


Imperfections VII: Running up That Hill

by Dasha (Dasha_mte)



Series: Imperfections [7]
Category: Stargate Atlantis, The Sentinel
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2006-01-11
Updated: 2006-01-11
Packaged: 2017-10-16 00:48:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 27,305
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/166664
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Dasha_mte/pseuds/Dasha
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sometimes you get all the breaks. This isn't one of those times. Warning: Strong language.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Imperfections VII: Running up That Hill

**Author's Note:**

> Kitty remains a careful and thorough editor, although I think I may be getting weirder and fuzzier every year. She envisions blocking and set decoration. She keeps track of flow. She keeps me honest. And without her help, I’m sure the dog will never get a name.
> 
> Disclaimer: Jim, Blair, Simon, and The Sentinel belong to Pet Fly, UPN, and Paramount and no copyright infringement is intended. So: not Mine. Not even rented, really. Just sort of borrowed. I'll give them back when I'm done.

Monday

Law enforcement was a popular career choice for sentinels. It was popular enough that Rainer offered a few courses for guides. In addition, several classes over in Criminal Justice were recommended as electives. Blair had taken none of them. His electives had been in psych and nutrition and first aid. He’d wanted to be a good guide. He hadn’t given much thought to what his sentinel would do for a living.

That last was just as well. Blair would never have imagined he’d work with a sentinel in law enforcement. And if he had, he probably would have gotten ready for forensics, not detective work. Since October, though, he’d had months to get used to police procedures, odd hours, intermittent physical danger, and the physical layout of public buildings downtown.

The meeting on Monday morning in the DA’s office wasn’t because Jim was a police officer preparing for one of his cases that was coming to trial. It was because he was a crime victim himself. None of Blair’s classes had prepared him for taking on a sentinel who had been abused by a previous guide. Blair had learned that on the job, too.

Monday morning Blair played it casual, hoping that was the way to go. On the drive in he chatted about the new grocery store going up on Patterson Avenue. "I’m not saying I’m not sort of looking forward to all that variety. And, yes, it would be nice to get some really good bread. But do we really need a luxury grocery store? Is that what we want for our community?"

"It could be another Walmart," Jim shrugged. "Or fast food. You’d go on about that for days. Say, if they have a fair selection of organic vegetables we won’t have to race to the farmer’s market on Saturday morning. Or miss it completely because we spend most of the morning sniffing dumpsters."

"Oh, great. That’ll make me feel much better, putting the local farmer’s market out of business."

The conversation was like that-—relaxed and friendly—-up until they reached the third floor of Urban-County Government Courts Annex B and the secretary said, "Ms. Sanchez is ready for you now. You can go on in."

Jim’s face froze. "The meeting was with Mr. Miller."

The secretary smiled blandly. "He was called away on a case. Ms. Sanchez will be acting as his assistant on this case."

Stiffly, Jim turned to Blair. "Chief, why don’t you go on over to Major Crime and wait for me there."

"But-—I was going with you."

With a hand on Blair’s shoulder, Jim led him back out into the hall. "I—Sandburg. I know her. She—we’ve worked together. We’re not friends, but, sort of, she’s not a stranger." Inwardly, Blair winced. He’d tried to set Jim up with Beverly several times. "I can’t talk about this stuff to her with you there, too. I can’t deal with you both at once."

"Jim, I’m your guide." Your ally. Your partner. How could having me there make a problem worse? But he didn’t say it out loud. It didn’t matter *why* it would be a problem, it just mattered that Jim thought it would. "Right. Okay. I’ll wait for you in the bull pen." He smiled, not bothering to be too convincing about it (because Jim could tell he was worried anyway) and headed back down the hall.

For half an hour he tried to turn Jim’s messy notes into a set of coherent reports. He couldn’t concentrate, though. The small, hard knot in his gut that had been there when he woke up that morning had turned to a churning mass the size of a basketball. What was she asking him? Was Jim okay?

It was useless. Blair closed the file he was working on and went to the break room. Sugar, he thought. Although in the long run that was *not* a sustainable way to cope with stress. And if he ever caught Jim doing it, he would read him the riot act. But. Blair got peanut butter cups out of the candy machine and a coke and sat down at one of the tables.

When Joel came in a few minutes later, Blair still hadn’t opened his snack. He jumped as Joel said, "Hey, Sandberg."

"Oh. Hi. What’s new?"

"Nelson got promoted."

"Oh, cool. He having a party?"

"Don’t know yet." Joel hesitating, hovering over the seat next to Blair’s. After a moment, he sat down. "So... you’re an expert on sentinels."

Blair blinked. "That’s the theory everybody’s working under, yes."

"I was just wondering... I mean, except for the senses, Jim’s mostly a normal guy, right?"

Blair sat up. Joel’s body language was way off, but other than a really obvious and inexplicable nervousness, Blair couldn’t read the signals he was sending. "You know I can’t discuss Jim with you."

"Right. Of course not." He paused. "But speaking in general—-sentinels in general—-sentinels are just like normal people."

 

Blair ruthlessly squashed the buzz of irritation. "Sentinels are normal people. The differences in their sensory input and brain structure are well within the range of normal human variation."

Joel nodded. "Right. Okay. But. There are some differences. They don’t... their average life span...."

"Can be as much as twenty years shorter than for other people living in the same society and social class. Yes." He managed to say that calmly and evenly. He couldn’t stop himself from adding, though, "That doesn’t mean they all die twenty years early across the board. It just means that some of them die early enough to bring the average down."

Joel nodded, looking past Blair. "And they can do all the things other people can do. They go to school. They live in regular houses and apartments. They have jobs."

"Well, they can’t work without a guide. But you aren’t asking me about Occupational Health and Safety Administration directives."

"They can get married." Joel still wasn’t looking at him.

"Yeah. In America not all of them do, but that’s about culture, you know, and expectation. In Japan and India the marriage rates for sentinels approach 95%."

"And they can date."

"Well, sure. Of course." Not that Jim *had* dated. But Blair would wear him down eventually.

"If *you* were dating a sentinel... I mean, if someone were dating a sentinel, what would they need to know?"

Blair’s eyebrows crept up. "Jim’s not your type," he laughed.

"What? Oh. Yeah. Very funny. But, uh, really. If someone were dating a sentinel, is there anything special....?"

Still clueless about where this was going, Blair gave in to Joel’s seriousness and gave him a serious answer. "That depends entirely on the sentinel. Most sentinels are highly functional and generally very physically stable. All you’d need is the guide’s phone number in case of emergency."

"What if it were someone who’d had...problems?"

"Okay, well." Blair thought very hard. "You have to understand that even for a lot of non-sentinels, dating is stressful."

"And for sentinels, stress is bad," Joel said heavily.

"Sometimes, yeah. For a fragile sentinel, stress can really mess things up. In really embarrassing ways, on a date. If I were dating a sentinel, especially one who was having problems, I’d try to keep things as low key as possible. Take things slow. Don’t make the individual outings too long. Cut things short if she shows any signs of distress—-"

"Like what?"

"I don’t know. You’ve been on dates before. If she says or does anything that’s completely new and unusual, that might be a sign."

"You have to have more than that," Joel said a little sharply.

"If she zones more than twice. If it’s hard to end a zone. If she’s disoriented. Rash, trouble breathing, sweating when it’s not hot. Strange mood swings."

"Okay. Good. What else."

What else? Blair hadn’t ever planned to date a sentinel. "If she doesn’t eat, *don’t* notice. Sentinel appetite is, well, it’s affected by a lot of factors. Just don’t make her feel self-conscious for not eating. If she gets tired, don’t fuss, just take her home. If she needs space or air or stops a conversation in the middle, don’t take it personally. She might just be spiking and need a moment to bring her senses in line."

"Right. Okay. That doesn’t sound too bad."

"Mostly, it’ll be just like any other date. Oh. Except for the sex."

Joel actually seemed to blush, although it was hard to tell. "Sex," he squeaked.

"Talk about it first. I mean it. Communication is necessary for *everybody* but for sentinels, without communication you have a disaster." Blair broke off. This was not something he’d gone into detail with for Jim. Maybe it was a really good thing he hadn’t started dating again yet. Because, hell, unprepared he was set up for an awful experience.

"Sandberg?"

"Right. Talk about it. Everybody’s body and--and experience varies, right? But for sentinels the variations are just so *huge* that if you don’t do the right thing or do do the wrong thing, it can be spectacularly awful."

"Gee, that’s comforting."

"It’s not a problem if you are communicating." Weirdly, it felt like he had turned into somebody’s dad, explaining the birds and the bees. "So what’s this all about, anyway?"

"Oh. Nothing. I was just curious."

"Oh," Blair said. Joel left, not quite bolting from the room. Still mystified, Blair turned back to his candy.

***

Jim showed up at 12:15, which only felt like an eternity later. He poked his head through the door and said, "Lunch, Chief. And after, let’s drop off Jack’s data."

Blair hurried to his feet, relieved to see his partner. "Do we have time?" He asked, snagging his jacket.

"Yeah. Brown doesn’t need us to talk to his suspects this afternoon. He got a confession."

"What, they heard you were on the case and caved?" Blair teased as they joined him in the hall.

"Actually, yeah. Sentinels scare the shit out of the guilty."

"You are the man." Jim smiled at him thinly at that and Blair said, "How did the meeting go?"

"Fine," Jim said shortly, stabbing the button for the elevator.

"And you don’t want to talk about it."

"Got it in one," he said.

Blair laid a careful hand on Jim’s arm. "You know, whatever--"

Before Blair even realized Jim had moved, Jim had caught him by the lapels of his jacket and slammed him into the wall beside the elevator. Blair was more shocked than afraid. He gulped back his yelp before it was half-out and held very still.

Jim released him and staggered back. His eyes were wide with panic. Blair, seized and then released so abruptly, nearly lost his balance. Jim started to reach for him, and then jerked away as though Blair was too hot or too sharp to touch.

Down the hall, Simon and Joel came out of the conference room, Simon grousing over a case, Joel listening tolerantly. Blair looked up. The elevator was hung up on the third floor. Blair pointed at the door to the stairs. Jim took the hint and fled. Blair followed.

The heavy door clanged shut behind them. Jim retreated to a corner of the landing. Blair considered his options and sat down on the stairs. Waiting.

After a few moments, Jim said heavily, "These stairwells are monitored."

"So? A guide takes his sentinel into a quiet place to do some breathing and settle out a bad spike. Not a big deal."

Jim nodded stiffly. He looked utterly miserable. Blair wanted to touch him, to ask what was wrong. He was fairly sure that either approach was a bad idea.

Finally, Jim said, "I apologize. I was out of line." He said the words distantly, as though they didn’t really touch what had happened. And they didn’t.

"That would mean a hell of a lot more if I thought it was me you... um..."

"Slammed into a wall," Jim said.

"I’m not hurt."

"I know."

"And it wasn’t me you were thinking of."

Jim closed his eyes and pressed himself further into the corner. "I know you’re not him. I know... You are nothing like him. Ever."

Blair winced. "You have some guide issues--"

"I spent six months in uniform. We’d get called on these domestic... " he paused, "And I understood those scum knocking their families around. That was pretty much a no-brainer, understanding them. But the--the victims. I never got how anyone could let someone... How things could ever get so bad. Only. I was." He panted a little as he forced himself to go on, "Lee Brackett. I *let* him."

"I know," Blair whispered, unwilling to watch Jim fighting himself over saying the words. "I know."

"You knew from the moment you met me...."

"No. I knew when I met him." He was on firmer ground here. "And it’s no great mystery how things got that far. He had all the advantages. He spent years learning how to control and manipulate sentinels. It wasn’t your fault, Jim."

"No. Well. It’s never the victim’s fault, is it?"

He meant it ironically, Blair thought, but the words were true none the less. "We have police because there are some problems individuals can’t solve alone. Even very competent individuals. Jim—-you survived it. Brackett didn’t beat you."

"He didn’t...beat you," Jim corrected.

Shit. Damn. Crap. Blair ground his teeth. "Lee Brackett is a sadist and a violent psychopath. In any civilized system, he never would have been allowed to work in an animal shelter, never mind being given sentinels to take care of. You put him in jail. He’s going to pay for his crimes." Crimes, Jim, crimes. Oh, god, let this go. You can see it. It wasn’t about you being weak. It was about him having all the advantages. But Blair clamped down on his desperation. Jim had to come to his peace himself. Blair couldn’t simply give it to him.

"Simon has seen some of the....He’s gotten updates on the case. He feels... responsible."

Blair said, "To be fair, I can’t blame him. But nobody ever expected a guide.... " He sighed. "Jim, what can I do?"

Jim sighed. "Let’s go to lunch."

"Okay. Sure. What do you want to eat?"

Jim frowned. "Not actually hungry..." he muttered.

"Right. Okay. We drop off the data first, and then I bribe you with toxic junk food."

"Your mind control techniques are mind boggling."

***

Jim didn’t see why his pending nervous breakdown needed to be his guide’s problem. Blair was doing a fine job. He was competent. And kind. And as far as he could see (and, to be fair, Jim still didn’t know much more than the basics about what a guide was supposed to do) he was doing it right. But even a really competent guide couldn’t compensate for Jim’s own shortcomings. Jim wasn’t much of a sentinel. Nor, it had turned out, much of a man. And, months after letting himself become a victim—-months after being rescued by a half-trained pacifist grad student who didn’t have any of the qualities Jim had always identified as strength--he couldn’t cope with stuff that was already over and should be forgotten.

A hearing tomorrow. Jim would have to go. He wouldn’t have to testify, but the DA wanted him there. And in four or five months would be a trial, and Jim would have to testify at that.

He’d thought things had been going well. He’d thought things had been getting back to normal. Okay, it was a weird kind of normal, and it involved having a new roommate who talked a lot and fed him way too many vegetables, but it hadn’t involved pain or exhaustion or–-or--

Jim stumbled on the thought, freezing with the keys to the truck halfway out of his pocket.

"Jim?" Blair said softly, hovering behind him.

It hadn’t involved pain or exhaustion or ....

"Why don’t you drive, Sandberg?"

"Sure."

Jim didn’t recognize the man who opened the door at Jack Kelso’s house. He could hear Marcia’s voice coming from the living room to the right, though, and while she sounded upset, she didn’t she didn’t sound threatened or upset *at* someone, so Jim figured everything was all right.

The stranger holding the door didn’t step back to let them in. His eyes swept over them in one scornful flicker. "Dr. Kelso isn’t seeing visitors," he said shortly. "He was shot last week."

Blair blinked, rallied. "Yes, I was with him. When he got shot. I’m Blair Sandberg."

The stranger, although no taller than Blair, managed to look down his nose at him. "Oh. The teacher’s pet. He’s not holding office hours."

"He’s expecting us," Blair said. He was being more patient with this asshole than Jim would have expected. "He called me last night. I have his data." He held up the box of discs. "We pulled them out of his office. When we found out his computer had been hacked, we were afraid...."

The doorman looked surprised. "Oh. That was actually good thinking." He opened the door wider and bellowed, "Company."

From the living room a male voice called, "Well, *handle* it, Rodney. We’re a little busy." The voice dropped in volume. "Frankly, I think you’re freaking out over nothing."

This time Jim could make out Marcia’s words. "He’s changed. And I’m not prepared. And I think he’s going to need so much more from me then I know how to... I just... It’s different."

"Yeah? So?" It was a guide speaking, Jim realized. He didn’t know how he could tell. There was nothing special that gave it away. "It’s hard on you both. And you’re sacred. But he’s not going to ask you to do anything he hasn’t been modeling for all of us for several years now. If you ask me, gentleness isn’t that hard to learn, and it’s about damn time we all did."

Blair lightly tapped the back of Jim’s hand to get his attention. "Jim, this is Dr. McKay. He’s loosely affiliated with Rainier."

"Rainier is loosely affiliated with me."

Blair shrugged. "He’s a structural engineer."

"I get paid obscene amounts of money to keep ugly buildings from falling down." Dr. McKay smiled tightly and looked Jim up and down. "A pleasure to meet you, Detective. Jack’s awake. Don’t stay too long." Dismissing them from his attention, he turned and headed for the kitchen. Blair blinked, looking a little bemused and then headed down the hall toward the bedrooms.

Jim followed. "Well, he’s a winner," he muttered.

"Hush. Don’t be rude. Jack’s been researching sentinels since he left... you know, his last job. He knows everybody."

Jim nodded vaguely. He was already listening—-almost involuntarily—-for Jack. He wondered how normal it was, this impulse to watch everyone all the time. He had a firm intention, this time, *not* to rush and get his hands on his friend, not to sniff and listen and *pry* his way into the personal and private business of Blair’s advisor. Just because he was a sentinel and he could.

Jack looked tired and pale and he reeked of pain meds and antibiotics. Jim pressed his back against the door frame as Blair went forward, the box of discs held out like a holy offering. Jack smiled thinly. "It’s unsalvageable, you know," he said by way of greeting. "My computer at the school. Even if it weren’t federal evidence at this point. If I hadn’t disconnected the computer here, I suspect it would have been wiped, too."

"Where do you want these?" Blair asked.

"Set them there. I have another set of back-ups here, but today I’m feeling paranoid enough to ask Marcia to put one set in the safe deposit box. It would take me a year to reconstruct those results from my paper records." Jack’s eyes tracked the box of discs even as he paused to breathe. "I appreciate your thinking of them. I don’t suppose you’d consider sneaking in my laptop so I can work on it?"

"Right. Your sentinel can break my arm without breaking a sweat."

"Do not be derailed by unimportant details." His eyes shifted to Jim. "How’s she doing?"

Jim listened. "It’s quiet," he said after a moment. "He’s got her doing a breathing exercise." Jim smiled slightly. "Is it kosher to have me spying on her for you?"

"It’s abysmal behavior on my part," Jack said gently. "But I’m both wounded and disabled, and I cheat. I am also about to take advantage of you both shamelessly. And stop standing way over there. I’m tired of shouting."

Obediently, Jim came over and sat on the bed. He didn’t bother to resist the impulse to press his hand against Jack’s stomach.

"Well?" Jack prodded.

"Different antibiotic since the last time I saw you." Jim closed his eyes, trying to sort out the smells. He was dimly aware of Blair watching patiently. He knew what Blair would say, but he didn’t need to hear it. Paying attention to the moment was easy when it was people. People were more real than anything else. "It’s not the antibiotic; this one doesn’t work as well. But you smell stronger."

"I couldn’t keep anything down with the last one." So they had changed it, and it wasn’t as good, but he could eat.... Jim nodded, seeing it clearly.

It was like submerging his hand in water; Jim could feel the pull of currents against his palm... the swift ebb and flow of breath, the quick and uneven rhythm of a heart that was still working harder than Jim liked.

Better, though. Much better. Stronger.

"Satisfied?" Jack asked softly.

"Better," Jim answered. Reluctantly, he let go. "What do you need us to do?"

"I’ll need you to baby sit. Marcia won’t leave me alone. She can’t go shopping. She has a job later this week—-she can’t work if she won’t leave me."

"Working?" Jim asked.

"Part time security," Blair reminded him. "The rich and famous pay a lot to have a sentinel on staff, even when they don’t need it."

"Especially when they don’t need it," Jack corrected. "The security company already has a sentinel on staff, but he wants a night off now and then. I think it will be good for her."

"Stressful, though," Jim said.

"Yes, but not relentless worry. It took her a week to talk me into this, so don’t talk me out of it. Don’t cause trouble in paradise. I’ll need you to give her some time off occasionally. Free of me."

Jim nodded.

"Good. Now, tell me how your meeting went this morning."

Jim sighed. "He won’t deal. His lawyer is a scumball. So...it’s going to trial."

"It’s early yet--"

"It’s going to trial, Jack." There was no point in hoping otherwise. "They’ll want you and Blair both to testify when the time comes."

Jack nodded. "It will be my pleasure."

"Really? What do we have on him? I mean really? That the man was bad at his job? That he was an asshole?"

"I witnessed attempted murder once. Blair witnessed it twice," and Jack sounded so reasonable that for a moment Jim felt hopeful.

Then he remembered. "They’re going to say... the defense will probably make their case around me being a sentinel. How could I really—-really—-work with a criminal, a sadist for months and not know? They’re going to say this was a personal feud that got out of hand. They’ll say I’m greatly exaggerating the threat he represented. And that if he’d been that bad a guide, one of our colleagues would have noticed."

"No," Jack said firmly. "They won’t get away with that. I’ll testify that any sentinel with basic education would have fired Brackett in the first week. I’ll tell them that by the time the abuse became overt you were already sick and emotionally traumatized."

And yes, Jim thought, it would be worth it. It would be worth being shown to the whole world as a victim in order to bring Brackett down. "Except you can’t, Jack."

"I’m an expert in my field. They will believe me."

"I put away a serial killer under Brackett. Two rapists. A major arms dealer. Most of the Sunrise Patriots. I worked those cases. More. Jack, you can’t... you can’t cast doubt on my judgment. I did good work. Some of those cases are coming up to trial. If my testimony--"

"I know you did--"

"If you cast doubt on my competence, some of those people will walk."

Jack shuddered. "No. He is not getting away with this--"

"You can tell them I was ignorant. You can tell them I was sick. But you can’t say I wasn’t in my right mind."

"No! That sick bastard is not getting away with this--"

From the living room Jim could ear Marcia rousing. "Ellison, you’ve upset my guide, and I’m going to kill you."

"God damn it, he is not getting away with this. Bad enough it happens under federal jurisdiction, but I am not allowing it out here."

The guide in the living room: "Settle down. Marcia? What’s wrong?"

And the other sentinel: "Marcia, he’s fine. They’re just talking."

"Get out of my way."

"Now, Marcia, there’s no reason to get all emotional. Hey! She hit me. She hit my nose. Does this look broken to you?"

Crap. Jim jumped up and retreated across the room to hide behind Blair.

The door to Jack’s bedroom wasn’t shut, but Marcia managed to slam it open anyway. The door bounced off the wall. "What is the matter with you, you fucking idiot?" Her voice was ice. Jim wondered how out of control she might be. He wondered how out of control he would be if Blair were recovering from a shooting and somebody upset him this much.

Jack was pale and panting now. "Stop it. Stop it. Stop it." He repeated the words in a voicelessly litany. "Stop. Marcia."

Marcia wasn’t listening. Her hand flashed past Blair’s shoulder, going for Jim. "Are you a complete idiot?" she asked. "I get that you’re really pathetic, I do. His big charity case. But you are not worth it."

The guide from the living room seized her wrist and hauled her around. Jim could guess at her training, and if she’d labeled this guy as a threat he would probably have been toast, but she didn’t resist as he shoved her toward the bed. "Stop acting like a four year old. Being a jerk isn’t going to solve anybody’s problems."

She folded her arms and stood stiffly over Jack. "Get them out of here," she snarled.

"Right, wonderful idea. Let’s go. I’m John, by the way. Nice to meet you. Let’s give them a few minutes, hmmm?"

Jim found himself firmly hustled back into the hall.

They almost ran into Dr. McKay. He had a wad of tissues pressed to his nose. "That woman is a lunatic. She ought to be locked up. But I’ve said that before." He removed the tissues. "Is this still bleeding?"

His guide sighed. "It was never bleeding."

McKay waved a tissue with two drops of blood on it. "Hello, bleeding? We’re supposed to be in Texas right now. I had three more days in Texas. On an expense account."

"One, you were finished with the actual work," John said. "Two, it was your idea to come back." He turned to Blair. "What the hell happened in there?"

Blair blinked, carefully didn’t look at Jim and said, "There’s a court case they both have an interest in. He asked Jim how it was going."

"The Brackett trial going that badly?"

Suddenly protective, Blair slipped in front of Jim. "How much do you know about it?"

"Only generalities." His eyes flipped to Jim, oddly sympathetic. "And it’s gotten a little coverage in the paper." He added, "I washed out of the federal guide program," as though it would explain everything. And maybe it did, except Jim didn’t really understand.

"Don’t believe it," McKay said. "He told them to go fuck themselves in such eloquent terms that they discharged him from the Air Force. And told him to drop dead."

"How are they doing?" John asked.

McKay shrugged, but motioned them further down the hall. "Jack is asleep. The psycho bitch has gone all protective and is sitting on a chair that’s up against the door."

Automatically, Jim listened in to check the pronouncement. He distinctly heard the whisper: "Look whose talking, you anal-retentive, insensitive freak."

McKay smiled a little, and like a ten-year-old, whispered back, "I know what you are, but what am I?"

His guide punched him firmly in the shoulder. "Stop that."

McKay shoved back. "Make me. Besides, everybody hates her. You guys hate her, don’t you?"

Jim realized that McKay was looking at him, but he couldn’t answer. The friendly, helpful guide had just socked his sentinel in the shoulder. It was nothing. A little roughhousing. Jim knew what it looked like when people goofed around, but somehow it felt as though the ground had tilted beneath his feet. His balance was gone. All he could think of was that you couldn’t tell from the outside what was good and what was not. How did you know, watching a sentinel and guide push and shove at each other... how did you know when it was normal and safe and healthy and when someone was being systematically abused?

How would anyone know?

Jim didn’t have any idea what normal was, even, let alone how someone would recognize it.

Very softly, John said, "Rodney, go wait in the living room."

"Jim? You okay?" Blair’s voice. Jim realized that he had his eyes closed.

"Is there anything I can do to help?"

"Don’t touch him. No matter what. Jim? You zoned? Hey, come on. If Jack comes out and catches me screwing up a zone, he’ll file a change of grade and give me a retroactive F."

"He won’t," Jim whispered. The short conversation had exhausted Jack. Jim felt a flash of sympathy: how would he cope in Marcia’s place? How would he manage a guide who was helpless and hurting?

"Jim? What do you say we go get some lunch? I promised you Wonderburger."

Jim recognized the offer of escape. "Yes," he managed. "I’m starved." But he’d have to open his eyes. And move.

Swallowing hard, he reached for Blair’s shoulder. Found it. Solid under his hand. Jim forced his eyes open. Blair was watching him worriedly.

***

Jim held on to Blair’s wrist all the way out to the SUV and only let go when they got to the awkward moment of having to get in. "You don’t have to eat," Blair said. "I mean, if you can’t handle the smell...."

"You promised me Wonderburger. Don’t try to weasel out of it now." But when they pulled away from the drive-through, Jim ignored the hamburger, and only nibbled on a few of the fries.

Blair parked at the lot overlooking Donnaly Park and started on his own salad. He was playing it casual, making a point of not staring at what his partner did or didn’t eat.

"That was interesting," Jim said after a while. He was using a cold fry to play with the ketchup.

"Which part? The part where Marcia came to kill us or the part where you nearly passed out in the hall?"

Jim winced. "Actually, I meant you don’t often see one guide being a designated hitter for another like that. I mean, I know Dawson filled in for you once, but you’d just been kidnapped and I was pretty much a goner. This seemed... different."

Blair shrugged. "Maybe it’s not so professional. Maybe they’re just friends. I mean, I know Isobel has been keeping her eye on them. And while Sharona was out of town, we checked on Adrian a couple of times. Everybody has friends, right?"

"McKay and Marcia aren’t friends," Jim snorted. "You should have heard what she called him." Jim tried to think of sentinels he’d met who were reasonable, polite people. Frasier. Michael from the Anthro Department at Rainier. Macleod. Some of the monks at St. Sebastian’s. "Mostly, we’re real jerks, aren’t we?"

"Well... McKay is famous for being, ah, difficult. He never teaches more than one seminar at a time, but every fall he and Sheppard give a lecture to the incoming guide class. It’s the ‘really, you’d rather be in ethnography or research’ talk. All about how awful most sentinels are to work with. I hear it is very memorable."

"You never went?"

"That year, the only time they were scheduled to spend in Washington, McKay spent in the hospital with a broken wrist?"

"In the hospital for a broken wrist?"

"You don’t want to know," Blair said reflexively. Although, actually, bad reactions to pain of that order of magnitude didn’t appear from nothing. If Jim were susceptible to OPS shock the tendency would have surfaced by now. "Anyway, he’s very famous. Both for being obnoxious and for designing these really ugly sky-scrapers that don’t even crack in a Richter 7 earthquake. And he does this thing with metal fatigue and geometry. And bridges. He gets mentioned in text books."

"Gee, you should have asked for his autograph."

Blair laughed. "So," he said carefully. "You want to tell me what happened back there?"

"I didn’t almost pass out."

"That wasn’t a zone."

"No. I just...."

Blair realized that the back of Jim’s left hand was resting against Blair’s hip. He put down his salad and gently took the hand. "Flashback?"

"No. Not...exactly."

Blair wondered how far he could push. "Jim, if you were in trouble, you’d tell me, right?"

Jim smiled. "No, I’d probably lie about it and say I was fine until I collapsed."

Blair grimaced. "That would be very funny, if that wasn’t exactly what I was afraid of."

"How would I know?" Jim whispered. "How would I know if I were...if my guide were," Jim’s breath caught, "abusing me? I didn’t know before...."

Blair swallowed dryly, dimly aware that he was sweating all over Jim’s hand. They had danced around this uncertainty before. "As you deal with what happened to you, as you recover, you’ll, well, you’ll learn to make those judgments affectively. You’ve already learned a lot about how it is supposed to work, between a sentinel and a guide. I really don’t think it will take all that long before you start to rebuild some confidence here," Blair paused, breathed, breathed again. He had known that things would probably get worse before they got better. "In the mean time... Simon and Joel and Adrian are all watching me. Jack is watching me, and he is one of the best guide researchers—-one of the best guide teachers—-in the country. He makes sure you regularly get seen by a competent doctor. Jim, even if I wanted to hurt you...even if I wanted to--"

"No, Sandberg--"

"People are watching you, Jim. People who care about you."

"You care about me."

"Yes," Blair whispered. "But how do you know? I mean, you’re not able to take something like that on faith right now, right? So how do you know?"

Jim didn’t answer.

"It’s okay, if you’re not feeling trusting right now. I know I said that trust was important. But this isn’t about me."

"I can smell it," Jim said. "That’s the truth, what I can smell. I can smell how scared Marcia is. She’s trying not to be, but she knows what I know. Jack’s in trouble. And I can smell." He breathed in. "I can smell. When Sharona is impatient with Adrian. It doesn’t smell like Lee being impatient with me. You told me there were good guides--" without warning, Jim let go of Blair’s hand, threw the door open and stumbled into the parking lot. He got almost three steps away from the SUV before he bent over, vomiting.

Blair got out on the other side and slowly went around the back. He made a big loop, making sure that Jim could see him coming.

Jim stepped back and leaned against the car.

Blair waited, not sure what to do.

"None of them smelled like Lee. *You* don’t smell like Lee."

Blair crushed the surge of hope. "I’m not going to tell you...Jim, you don’t *have* to push this. I make mistakes. It’s okay if--"

"You don’t feel contempt when I’m afraid. If I disagree with you, you don’t smell *satisfied* when I get sick. I knew that. I know that."

"No."

"You’re angry. When I’m in trouble, you’re angry. Because nobody helped me. When I couldn’t. When I couldn’t protect myself."

Blair managed to shrug. He had really not expected this breakthrough to take place next to a park over lunch. "Yeah. That’s a mistake, actually. As Jack repeatedly points out. You don’t need my anger."

"It’s not...so bad," Jim said.

Blair stepped over the little puddle of vomit Jim had left on the asphalt. Jim didn’t flinch as he came closer. "You’re going to have to do a very hard thing tomorrow," Blair said.

"Lee Brackett is a criminal," Jim said. "I’m going to put him away. And you’re going to help me. You’re going to make sure I don’t screw this up."

"That’s actually a very good plan, Jim."

"Thank you," Jim said. "I think maybe you should call me in sick. I can’t see anything."

"Er, what?" Blair said faintly. He was close enough to touch Jim now, but his hands froze.

"I can see light, but the focus is all gone."

"Like with the golden?" Blair asked, feeling a little sick.

"No, this is stress related." Jim sounded very calm.

"Stress related?" He leaned up, looked into Jim’s eyes. They didn’t track the movement.

"It happened before. A friend of mine, another cop, had been killed. It was a professional hit, and I almost blew the case. My senses blinked on and off for a couple of days."

"Ah. Right." There was a brief mention in Jim’s medical record. It hadn’t required hospitalization, though, and Jim hadn’t talked much about it, so Blair didn’t have a lot to go on. "Are you experiencing any other symptoms?"

Jim didn’t answer that. "Lee told me that I was just being a wimp. He told me to shake it off."

"He wasn’t just a bastard. That was blatantly incompetent. You’d just come on line. It’s barely been a year; you’ve *still* just barely come on line. As new as you are, flickers... aren’t a big deal. And they’re not unusual. But they’re not a sign of weakness. As stress goes, I mean this is serious stress."

"I’m not freaking out, Chief. I just can’t see anything."

"Yeah. I know. I’m going to call Simon. And then I’m going to take you home and put in a movie. And fix some soup. This will pass."

"Okay."

"Let’s get you back in the car."

He got Jim home and settled on the couch with a ginger ale. There was a Clint Eastwood movie on cable. "Feeling any better?"

"I feel fine, but I still can’t see," Jim complained. "What if it’s not better tomorrow?"

"We’ve done the blind thing before. We can fake it."

"It won’t look good, me holding on to you."

Blair patted his shoulder. "It’ll look fine. It’ll show you’ve managed to enter into a healthy relationship with a guide."

Jim laughed.

"What?"

"Well, from where I’ve been sitting, most healthy relationships between sentinels and guides are pretty weird."

"Hey! At least we don’t have a wolf."

"Not a real one anyway."

"Or an entourage."

"So, what? You’re saying we’re normal?"

"Very. Average. Dull. Common as grass."

"Only you, Sandberg." Jim leaned sideways, so that his shoulder rested against Blair’s.

Jim’s vision and appetite came back together at around six o’clock. Blair produced the promised soup and then sent his partner off to shower. Simon called while Jim was in the bath room. "Do we need to talk about administrative leave?" he wanted to know.

"Not today," Blair said. "If tomorrow goes well, maybe not at all. Jim’s sort of coping."

"He’s sort of coping, except for you calling him in sick," Simon said doubtfully.

"Except for that, yes."

"Your call, Sandberg." Yes. It was.

 

Tuesday

That night Blair slept badly. Every time Jim turned over or sighed in his sleep, Blair found himself wide awake and listening for any sound of distress. Morning came, though, with no sign of trouble. Breakfast was mostly normal. Jim didn’t eat much, but he ate some. The trip downtown wasn’t unusually fraught with stress or worry.

They parked as usual in the PD lot. The reporters haunting the steps to the court building and the lobby were the usual reporters, not a giant crowd of rabid carrion eaters searching eagerly for a scandal. As a police detective and his guide, Jim and Blair didn’t have to stand in line for the metal detector with the visitors.

As they were walking past the waiting line, Jim halted in surprise and turned to one of the men standing there. Blair had to skip sideways to keep from running into him. "Hey, try hand signal--" Blair began, but at the look on Jim’s face he hesitated. Neither protest nor teasing seemed right. Jim was staring in astonishment at one of the people waiting in line. As Blair watched, Jim’s surprise faded to a chill amusement that didn’t really seem to find things funny. "Well, what brings you down town? Don’t tell me you’ve been indicted? I always knew you were heading for a bad end." The words were friendly, almost chiding. Jim’s tone was setting Blair’s hair on end.

Disconcerted, Blair turned to the man Jim was talking to. He was a business man; youngish, well-dressed, handsome. Not as tall as Jim, he was looking up as he gulped and fumbled. "Jimmy. I-I read the newspapers. I wanted to see for myself...." He blinked, tried to smile. "I was concerned."

Jim nodded slowly, the icy smile still in place. "It’s quite a scandal. I can see why you’re concerned." The smile got bigger. Blair was nearly shivering with the chill of it. "And I’m afraid I don’t have good news." He leaned forward slightly, creating the illusion of intimacy. "It’s all true. Every last bit of it. I’m a sentinel. A real, live freak of nature. And my first guide was an abusive psycho who nearly killed me. And it’s going to be in the news for *months*." The smile got even bigger. "And best of all, sentinalism is hereditary."

The man gaped. So did Blair. He’d never seen Jim like this before. He didn’t understand why he was being this way now.

"But I’m being rude. Please excuse me. This is my guide, Blair Sandberg." Without looking, Jim reached out and propelled Blair forward. "Chief, this is Stephen, my younger brother."

"Pleased to meet you," Blair squeaked, wondering if he was.

Jim ostentatiously checked his watch, "I’m sorry. We’re running late. Enjoy the show." Jim turned away, headed on toward the employee entrance next to the security check point.

Blair gaped at both of them, then scampered after Jim. From behind, Stephen asked, "Are you all right, Jimmy?"

Jim flashed his ID at the guard and continued through the check point and down the hall without a backward glance. He turned a corner half-way down the hall and ducked into the men’s restroom.

Blair hesitated. Men didn’t follow each other into the men’s room. It was weird. On the other hand, Blair had met Jim the day after Joel had found Jim collapsed on a men’s room floor. He couldn’t afford to take chances, weird or not. Blair gulped and charged ahead.

"Jim?" he asked.

Jim was at the sink, calmly washing his hands. "Be with you in a minute, Sandberg."

Blair glanced at the stalls. There was no sign of feet. "You okay, Jim?"

"Sure. Fine. I’ll be right with you."

Okay. Okay. Right. Because they had ten minutes to be in the courtroom, and they had to be calm. Blair nodded calmly and went to wait in the hall. Because, really, the best thing to do right now was pretend that had not happened.

Right. Jim’s estranged younger brother had not just appeared in line. It never happened. And, by the way, had that been some really nasty form of sabotage? Or was Stephen Ellison just really very clueless? He hadn’t looked angry or hostile. There had been no gloating or mockery. He’d seemed at a loss more than anything else. Maybe he hadn’t meant to cause trouble. Maybe he hadn’t meant to be noticed at all.

Blair just didn’t know enough about Jim’s family to guess. Jim’s cousin Rucker had mentioned a younger brother briefly, but Jim had never elaborated and Blair hadn’t taken time to look into the question. It was all they could manage to cope with Brackett’s damage and work on Jim’s new senses.

Jim appeared a moment later. He seemed perfectly calm and contained. Blair was impressed. Or worried. He tried to look serious but confident. If Jim could fake it, Surely Blair could manage.

The hearing lasted only twenty minutes and proceeded without delays or surprises. Paperwork passed back and forth. Court dates were scheduled. Lawyers chattered in three-part harmony. Blair kept still, unable to concentrate for the furious storm in his mind. Lee Brackett was sitting less than five yards away. He was dressed in a suit, looking well-groomed and satisfied. He had a small, confident smile. He didn’t look guilty. Or sorry. Or *worried* about anything.

Blair tried not to look at him. He tried to keep his shoulders relaxed and his breathing even. He tried not to think about the fact that Jim was still fragile and traumatized and the sick fuck who had abused him was pleading not guilty and mounting a defense.

If this could happen to Jim—-a cop, a confident and educated man who knew how to defend himself—-it could happen to anyone.

Jim laid a hand on Blair’s arm. Blair swallowed and tried to relax. Brackett was here looking confident and ready, but Simon was here too. And Joel. And Adrian and Sharona.

So Blair kept still and calm while the formulaic words floated overhead. Although the individual moments were excruciating, it was over very quickly and Brackett was soon being led away by the bailiffs.

"You okay?" Blair whispered as he stood up.

Jim didn’t answer.

Blair tapped his hand casually. "Jim?"

"Later," Jim said firmly. His bland expression was still in place. He headed toward the rear of the court room. All Blair could do was follow. Jim didn’t stop until he was standing in the back stair well with the door shut behind them.

"Jim? How you doing?" Blair asked softly.

Jim canted his head slightly, looking hard at Blair. "I can’t hear anything."

"Fuck," Blair muttered. "What happened?"

Jim shrugged and shook his head. Either he couldn’t make out the question or didn’t know the answer. Not that Blair needed Jim to answer. Stress wasn’t a hard diagnosis to make, not under the circumstances.

"You okay? How you feeling?"

He either didn't get the question or ignored it. "How did the hearing go? Any problems?"

Blair shook his head. "It’s fine."

"Good. That’s good." Jim took a deep breath. "Still no bail? Still no deals?"

Blair nodded. "It’s okay. It’s all okay, Jim."

"Okay?"

Blair nodded, wondering if this would be the moment that Jim’s calm façade cracked. It wasn’t. He took out his cell and handed it to Blair. "Call Rafe. Find out if he has any work for us."

"I could take you home," Blair offered. Jim blinked at him and shrugged. The sentence was too complicated to lip read. "Home?"

"No. This will pass in a few minutes. I want to get some work done. Yesterday was a write-off." When Blair didn’t move, he added, "I don’t need my ears to look at a crime scene or go over a body."

So Blair called Brian, who turned out to be on his way to look at an abandoned car that had been used in a series of hold-ups the previous week. One convenience store robbery wasn’t a ‘major crime,’ but five in five days, in nice parts of town, and all of them in the late afternoon so they were ‘breaking stories’ during the evening news was close enough to get bumped to the sixth floor.

Jim let Blair drive, which was reassuring (don’t think about driving with someone who was currently undergoing hysterical deafness and might lose one or more others) but worrisome (Jim had to be in real trouble if he was accepting help). Blair was surprised to discover that it wasn’t only Jim he was worried about. He was also bothered about the case. If Jim was enough a mess that his senses were cutting out, what kind of job would he be able to do on the evidence? Worse, knowing a sentinel had been over the car, the evidence people might not look too closely. Why bother? Overlooked trace evidence could make a difference in getting an arrest or conviction. It was robbery, not murder, not a big, flashy case, but that wouldn’t matter. Jim would be more than upset if a mistake he made screwed up the case. Blair, the guide responsible for keeping Jim functional, wouldn’t be thrilled about it either.

As it turned out, though, Blair was probably worried about nothing. Jim’s ears weren’t working, but his nose was fine. He listed off two people’s worth of personal care products and dug a dirty sock out from under the seat. "Tide with bleach and untreated athletes’ foot," he announced.

No one noticed that Jim didn’t answer questions. Sentinels were famous for narrow concentration and apparent absentmindedness. They had all worked a scene with sentinels before. Ignoring people didn’t even register as rudeness, let alone as suspicious.

So. Things were going just fine. There was nothing to worry about.

***

Jim unfolded himself from the back seat of the Toyota and stripped off the latex gloves. "Hungry, Chief?"

"I’m game any time," Sandberg said, watching Jim’s face closely. "Steak?" Jim winced. Sandberg never offered steak unless he was worried about emotional stability and basic calories.

"I was thinking Leo’s, actually," Jim said, waiting for the cheerful teasing that was bound to follow. Leo’s was a new-age deli. Not quite vegetarian, it served no red meat and specialized in drinks involving wheat grass. Jim had never suggested it.

All Sandberg said was, "You don’t have to humor me."

"They have good bread," he explained. And they did have good bread, but what he felt silly mentioning was that he was in the mood for a turkey club with bacon and avocado. Until a few months before, avocado was just the green background mush you added spices to in order to make blistering guacamole which had been edible before the senses and was impossibly out of reach now. The mushy, pale background hadn’t even registered before. Now... he kind of liked it. Actually, really liked it. Fru-fru new age pansy vegetable or not, the taste was really good.

"You’re the boss," Sandberg said. If he was drawing conclusions about the lunch request, he didn’t mention them. "How’s the hearing?"

"Coming up very slowly. Like I have water in my ears. The less I pay attention the better it gets."

"Right. Talking about something else. Mom’s speaking at an environmental conference in Arizona next month, did I mention?"

"Is she still working the ‘sentinel’ angle?"

"Yeah. But it’s tasteful, I promise. Besides, she’s trying to protect everybody here. We’re all sharing this planet together."

"Relax. I’m not criticizing."

Sandberg was a saint at lunch. He didn’t ask Jim any questions. He didn’t hover. He kept the conversation light. Mainly, he griped about politics, which was safely impersonal, if boring.

They spent the afternoon helping Monk sort through garbage for some case. Jim was never sure why they were looking for an old dish towel that smelled like human blood, catnip, and Neem toothpaste. As always, Monk’s thinking was convoluted and a little weird. The work itself was gross but sort of absorbing. Every half hour or so, Blair would pull him aside and hold out a cup of coffee grounds for him to sniff. Once or twice they ran into rotted meat or mushy fruit, and Jim had to pull back, gagging. Rancid baked beans sent him completely out of the room.

Each time he got overwhelmed, Sandberg was there with a plastic cup of very cold water and very firm instructions on relaxing and letting go of the nasty stench that wanted to cling to the inside of his nose.

Jim consoled himself that at least he was coping better than poor Adrian, who was wearing three layers of sterile gloves and continually fretting that one of them might be leaking and poisoning him with toxic sludge.

At four fifteen, Monk found his dish towel and raced off with Sharona shouting that he had solved the case. Feeling not the last bit guilty, Jim left the mess for Caroline’s people to clean up and headed home.

It was raining a little. The streets were crowded and gray and it took forever to get to the loft. When they finally got in and took off their damp jackets, Sandberg cut loose with the hovering he’d been concealing all day. "You want some beer, Jim? How about a shower?"

Jim checked the lock on the door and then lowered himself carefully onto the couch. "Sit, Sandberg," he said.

Blair sat on the coffee table. "Do you want to talk about it?" he asked softly.

Jim sighed and rested his forehead in his hands. "There’s nothing to talk about. You already know everything."

A soft sigh. A restless shift slightly closer, so their knees were almost touching. "Jim, you haven’t said anything all day. I don’t know anything if you won’t talk to me. Cut me a break. Don’t make me guess. It’s too important."

Jim flopped back and let his head drop over the back of the couch. "I don’t want to talk about it. Don’t do this, Sandberg. I know you understand. I can smell it."

"You can smell it," Sandberg whispered. "Okay. I guess I know everything I need to." He shifted so that he was sitting beside Jim on the couch and laid a hand on his arm. He tugged gently, and before he knew it, Jim was lying with his head in Blair’s lap and his feet sticking off the end of the couch.

It felt oddly normal. And weird, but Jim reminded himself that *this*--whatever it was--was just a sentinel thing. Right and common and okay and actually normal. What Lee had shown him was vile and cruel. Having a guide was supposed to be about trust and reassurance, and if he was going to get past the horrible half-year where a criminal had tried to kill him slowly he was going to have to try it Sandberg’s way.

He took a deep breath and let it out. Blair’s hands gently fluffed through Jim’s hair, and then the afghan was tugged down over Jim’s shoulders. "I don’t know what to tell you, Jim. I wish I could just make all this go away. It’ll be months before this is over."

"We have to-—we can’t—-Sandberg--"

"I know. We have to make sure he doesn’t get near anyone else. Ever."

An image flashed through Jim’s head and he laughed thinly.

"What’s so funny?"

"Everybody does this right? The bonding thing?"

"Everybody healthy and sane, yeah. Or getting there."

"So... Marcia." Jim smiled to himself. "I can’t picture it."

Blair hugged Jim’s shoulders gently. "I imagine she’s had to unlearn a lot of bad habits. She got her advanced training from the psychos who trained Brackett."

Right. So MacLeod did this. And Frasier. And those nice sentinel monks. And speaking of monk, Adrian did this. Or at least he had, with his wife. He could barely stand Sharona touching his shoulder. "Ha. And that other guy. McKay. That is hard to picture."

"Are you kidding? McKay and Sheppard, they’re legend, man. When Jack first started publishing his work on sentinel health and guide attachment, the old-school ‘stay objective’ crowd fell on him like a ton of bricks. And so McKay and Sheppard came forward and identified themselves as one of the case studies."

"What, you mean they voluntarily identified themselves as research subjects?"

"Yeah. Apparently, it wasn’t a big deal to them."

"Huh." Jim could never picture doing that.

"You’ll be relieved to know that being a huge pain in the ass is no barrier to mutual attachment, you know, with compatible personalities and a lot of good communication."

"Oh, very funny."

Sandberg hugged him again. The hand in his hair was still petting, but more slowly now. "I’ll tell you anything you want to know," Jim whispered.

"Okay," Sandberg said. "Later though, huh?"

"Okay. You know... I think I’d like to see it."

"See what?"

"Some of Jack’s work."

"Yeah, sure. Whatever you want." Sandberg’s thumbs were pressing along Jim’s skull behind his ears. It felt remarkably good. It was a pressure point thing, he realized. "Deep breath for me, okay? And again."

The phone rang. Sandberg jumped, but carefully stilled himself. "It’s all right. Let the machine get it."

"Could be work."

"Yeah. It could be."

"*Blair, it’s Jack--*"

Jim lifted his head up and Sandberg scooted out from underneath.

"*I need a fav--*"

"Here, we’re here," Blair said, scooping up the phone and turning off the machine.

"*How are you doing?*"

"Not bad. Court went well."

"*I heard. Jim?*"

"He’s good. Coping." Sandberg glanced over at Jim, who was sitting up and rubbing his face. "We’re good."

"*I called because I need a favor. Marcia needs to go out tomorrow night, and I’m going to need that babysitter sooner than I thought.*"

Jim could clearly hear, in the background, Marcia say: "*I don’t need to go. You’re blowing this way out of proportion.*"

"Sure," Sandberg said, clearly unaware of the mutiny. "Anytime. You know that. What time should we show up?"

"*Really. Jack. This is—-it was a stupid idea.*"

"*Five-thirty would be perfect. But if you can’t manage that because of work--*"

"We’ll call if we run late."

"*Thank you. This means a lot.*"

"No problem." Sandburg said goodbye and hung up. "I hope you don’t mind. I can go alone, if you don’t feel like it."

"No. That’s fine. It’s not just that he’s our friend. Jack’s... important."

Sandberg nodded. "So, hungry? We can do spaghetti. There’s sauce in the freezer."

***

Wednesday

Blair woke from a sound sleep to the sound of a guttural yell that had him out of bed and out the door before he realized why he was moving. Half-way up the stairs the yell choked off and was replaced by a wretched mewling that sound like both anger and heartbreak. "Jim!" he shouted. "I’m coming. I’m coming."

In the ambient light from the skylight he could see Jim tangled in the sheets, thrashing and struggling but unable to free himself.

"It’s okay, it’s okay," he babbled franticly, reaching out but not touching. "Jim, it’s me."

Jim oriented on his face and opened his mouth to speak or cry out but nothing came.

Unsure what to do, Blair held out his arms. Jim surged toward him, but he was still caught in the sheets. He would fallen from the bed if Blair had not caught him and shoved him backwards. "Easy. It’s okay."

"Bastard," Jim choked. "Bastard."

"Yes," Blair said, grateful for a coherent word. "What? What?"

"Bastard. Everyone said to trust him. Obey him." Another yell, not as loud, but still guttural, almost animal. "He never helped me. He never--"

Oh. Well. "I know. I know. You’re right."

"He said it was my fault. My own fault when I got sick. I deserved it."

"Wasn’t true."

"Bastard."

Blair told himself there was no reason to panic. This was about the worst he’d seen Jim, but he’d been waiting for this, hadn’t he? This was normal. Necessary. Yes, Jim was soaked and sweat and possibly hyperventilating, but this would pass. "I know, Jim," he whispered, trying to offer his voice, his presence since he couldn’t solve this problem. "I know."

"He had control over whether I worked or not. My career was in his hands. My life. He nearly killed me."

Blair felt his eyes fill. "I know." He tried not to think about how close it had been. Very carefully, as he’d grown closer to his partner, Blair had tried not to imagine the scope of the loss. He tried not to think about what might have happened, of how near they had been. But sometimes he couldn't help it, and denial gave way to ugly recognition of just how much danger Jim had been in. Dear God. He might have died. He had come close to it more than once....

To never have met Jim. Or worse, to have met him and lost him. Jim had been sick and basically helpless by the time Joel went looking for help. If Jim hadn’t recovered....

"I would have let him. I almost let him kill me." Jim groaned. "You never called me on it. Why do you smell like this?"

"Like what?" Blair asked, not sure if he should expect an answer.

"Like you care! How can you—-God, Chief, how can you respect me? You know what I let him do--"

"Oh. Oh, Jim. You know... the big surprise that day in the hospital," Blair stumbled, took a breath, and went on, "I was ready to like the work. I—I never expected to like you so much."

Jim laughed. It was a terrible sound. "You’re saying that to increase my life expectancy."

"Hell, yes. But I can’t lie. Not to you." Jim was shaking. He might be cold; he was soaking wet. Blair tried to free up some blanket to cover him. "I’m not him. And you are recovering from what he did to you. I know it’s not okay yet, Jim, but it’s going to be."

Perhaps that was the wrong thing to say. It was unprovable, and, anyway, absolutely no help now, when Jim was only feeling pain and shame and anger. "Breathe, Jim."

"I kept trying to do what he told me to. It didn’t make any sense. And it all hurt."

"Breathe. Breathe."

Jim was clinging, rigid and panting. His grip on Blair’s arms was painfully hard. Blair held him in silence, trying to remember everything Jack had told him about patience. And everything his mother had taught him about grounding and centering. And whishing he had learned the Prayer for Mercy the monks at St. Sebastian’s used at the start of Afternoon Meditation. This was horrible, but good. Much better than Jim knew. The choice was to deal with the pain or carry it around inside, and this crap had all but killed Jim once already.

At last Jim said, "What time is it?"

"Dunno," Blair leaned to see the alarm on the other side of the bed. "Fiveish."

"Hell. Fine. Let’s get dressed, go grab some breakfast. IHOP? Fred’s Diner? My treat. You know, to pay you back for the sleep deprivation."

"Oh, please. This isn’t sleep deprivation. Mid-terms TAing for Hughes, that’s sleep deprivation. Thirty hours grading discussion questions. This is nothing. But I’m up for breakfast."

***

They spent most of the day preparing for a political rally at the civic center. Somebody wanted to impeach the mayor or something. Bribes were involved. Or possibly a sex scandal. Jim couldn’t concentrate on the buzzing of complicated allegations. Whatever. People were mad. There had even been a small riot a couple of weeks before, while Jim and Blair were out of town. If you could count two broken windows and a flipped-over car as a riot. Jim had seen riots in South America, and wasn’t impressed.

As a detail went, it was fantastic. Jim didn’t have to talk to people or smell the blood and terror of a crime scene. He didn’t even have to pick through anybody’s garbage. All he had to do was walk circles through and around the building, listening and smelling for bombs. Somebody had recently urinated in the west stairwell, which wasn’t a lot of fun. But other than that, the assignment was both distracting and uneventful.

 

The rally kicked off at three. Jim went up to the roof, which got him away from the loudspeakers and gave him a view of the parking lots and buildings on all sides. The crowd was small, or a lot smaller than estimates. Jim didn’t smell any explosives or drugs. Weapons were everywhere, but that was because the police were wearing them. And anyway, metal detectors had been set up at the entrances.

They pulled up in front of Jack Kelso’s at 5:45. Marcia met them at the door. She looked irritable and smelled nervous. She handed Blair two timers. Pointing to the one with forty-five minutes left on it, she said, "This goes off every two hours. You need to help Jack change position. You’re a little scrawny, but Jim can probably handle it. It’s important. This one," she pointed at one with two and half hours left on it, "means take the puppy out into the back yard so it can make scat. It is also important."

Sandberg blinked. "Do what? Puppy?"

Jim sniffed and winced. "I think she means that, chief." He nodded to a pair of brown eyes peeking out from under a chair in the living room. Jim smirked at Marcia. "You got a widdle puppy wuppy."

"Up yours," she said without heat. "The animal is clean and healthy. Anyway, I got him for Jack. He needs something cute and soft, and it’s just not me. I’m late. My cell number is posted by the phone. Don’t screw up. I mean it." She left in a swirl of jacket and a slamming door.

In the silence, Sandberg wiggled his eyebrows and whispered, "See? My life could be so much worse." He raised his voice, "Jack? You okay?"

The puppy-—a dull brown ball of fur with floppy ears—-darted past Jim as Sandberg headed down the hall.

"Come on in, guys. Let’s make some decisions about dinner. There’s a lot of left over turkey. Or we can order out."

Kelso was still in bed. He was looking perkier though, and every square inch of the blanket was covered in journals and loose papers. Jim closed his eyes and sniffed experimentally. Two days had brought some improvement. The wound was clean. The pain medication was at a lower dosage....

Not bad, really.

When Jim opened his eyes he caught Jack watching him avidly. Jim smiled just slightly, and Jack nodded, accepting the silent report. "So Tropical Storm Marcia has left the building?" he asked.

"Yeah. Sorry we were late. Was this an assignment for the new job?" Sandberg said.

"Nope. It was a date."

"You’re kidding," Jim said, belatedly realizing that he has said it out loud. "I mean, I’m sure it will be good for her... er... mood." In retrospect, that wasn’t an improvement.

Sandberg rolled his eyes. "You are *such* a cave man. A woman is grumpy and you assume she needs to get laid--"

"Well thank you for that image," Jack interrupted. "She’s practically my sister. I do not need to picture her, ah being...."

He blushed and skidded to a halt. Quickly, Sandberg asked, "So who’s she seeing? Another sentinel?"

"Your Detective Taggart. If he breaks her heart, by the way, I’m holding you two responsible."

Jim gasped. "Joel?" He couldn’t picture it. Joel wasn’t a stupid man.

Sandberg just nodded. "Actually, that answers a lot of questions."

Jim wondered if the question Blair was thinking of was, "why has Joel been exhibiting symptoms of insanity?" but he didn’t ask it aloud in front of Marcia’s guide.

The puppy whined and nudged at the side of the bed. Sandberg leaned down and picked it up.

"Don’t let him on the bed," Jack said quickly, motioning to the scattering of papers and books and magazines heaped around him.

Sandberg turned the puppy over so he could pet its stomach and said sympathetically, "I bet you’re counting the days."

"Until the stitches come out? Hell yes. You realize that is what is freaking out Marcia so badly; I cannot move without risking tearing something. She’s afraid I’ll get impatient and... ." He sighed and shook his head. "I’m starting to have some real energy, finally, and it still hurts too much to try to type. Oh!" He brightened suddenly and began to dig through the piles of paper. "This may be what you’re looking for."

Sandberg passed Jim the dog and took the journal Jack handed him. It was open to an article titled, "Muddied Perspectives and the Danger of the Touchy-Feely Guide."

"Ouch," Blair said, skimming the first page.

"What is it?" Jim asked. It looked like gibberish.

"A really nasty slam on an article Jack published last June."

"Flip over two pages. I’ve marked a section," Jack said. "I think this might be a man you want to talk to."

"Wow," he said after a moment. "Well—-is this true?" He turned to Jim. "This guy runs a crime lab in Los Vegas. It says here he has four sentinels in his department." He turned back to Jack. "Nobody has four sentinels. Not in the same department. It’s too expensive. Not even New York or LA does that."

Jack held up his hand, fingers spread wide. "Five," he said. "The author is also a sentinel."

"But that doesn’t—" He flipped back to the first page and pointed to the initials following the name, "M.A.," he said. "LG(A). He’s a guide. Is that allowed? You can’t be both."

Jack shrugged awkwardly. "There’s no law that says a sentinel can’t go to guide school."

"Right. No. But he can’t get around OSHA and guide himself in the field."

"No, every year he takes a new graduate doing practicum."

"A different guide every year," Blair whispered. "A different novice guide every year."

"And he’s listed as the guide of record for a sentinel in the local coroner’s office."

"Holy crap," Blair whispered. "How can he-—but of course, there’s no rule against it. But....sentinels don’t work in groups."

Jack shrugged with his good shoulder again. "So they say."

"Have you met this guy?"

"No, but I would like to."

Jim didn’t quite understand what they were talking about. Or rather, he understood, but he didn’t see why they seemed so excited. "So, about dinner?" he said. "How about I go pick up some Chinese?"

Jack looked up. "Oh. Right. ‘Harold Woo’s’ is very good. Vegetarian, but it’s sentinel quality food, and Marcia won’t read me the riot act when she sees the empty take-out boxes."

Jim got directions to the restaurant and left the two guides talking shop.

When he got back with mushroom dumplings, tofu chow fun, stir fried mixed vegetables, and fried rice there was a strange car in the driveway. He was out of the car with his weapon half-out before the sound of Blair saying, "folding tables around someplace. We can drag in a couple of chairs and set up for dinner in the bed room."

Jim stopped so short he nearly tripped over his own feet. What the hell was that? He'd gone straight into a search and rescue state of mind. He hadn't noticed being stretched quite so tightly. Talk about a hair trigger--

But. Surely. It was only natural to be protective. Kelso was almost completely defenseless right now, and Sandburg, while smart and creative, was also small and untrained. Neither of them was in a position to fight off an intruder. It made sense that Jim would be cautious.

Which was bull shit. Resolutely, Jim turned back to the car and retrieved the bags of dinner. He was being paranoid. No big surprise. The whole thing with Brackett was fucking with his head. He’d had years to see what happened to people—-victims of war, victims of crime. Being any kind if victim tended to mess people up. Sometimes badly. Possibly, Jim shouldn’t be walking around armed.

In the house, Sandberg was saying, "—-sort of thing has to happen all the time."

"That’s just the problem. It does happen all the time. Or it did, until he got fed up with it and stopped trying." Jim recognized the voice, the guide from the other day, "Then this damn water park came along, and he just couldn’t resist."

A normal conversation. Peaceful. See? Nobody was a threat to his guide. The background sounds were moving furniture, not violence.

Kelso sighed, "And he’s been passed over again."

"Oh, worse than that," Sheppard said. "Word’s gotten around that they didn’t even *look* at Rodney’s designs. His reputation is so bad they were afraid that it would ‘scare away investors’ to have his name on the project. Damn it."

"Wow," Sandberg said sympathetically. "That’s really cold."

"I saw the CAD drawings," Sheppard said softly. "It was incredible. There’s nothing like it ever before, and they can’t possibly match...." A long pause. "He had roller coasters. In water, roller coasters. He designed sluices and jets pushing water uphill fast enough to carry a three-hundred pound person uphill at fifteen miles per hour. He had a wave pool—-not like other wave pools, believe me.*Impossible* wave pools. One was half the size of an Olympic swimming pool, but you could have surfed in it. Another was in sort of cavern with colored lights. There was a flume more than half a mile long, through canyons and fountains. It was magnificent, Jack, and-—did I mention, under budget? I ran the numbers for him. His costs were only two-thirds what the developers wanted to spend. And they wouldn’t look at it."

"Rodney must be devastated," Jack said sympathetically. "John, I wouldn’t leave him alone too long."

"*What*? Jack, he’s not going to do anything stupid! He isn’t--he isn’t going to hurt himself. This is Rodney McKay. But after this, he has earned the right to have a tantrum and throw things if he wants to without anybody there to watch."

Somehow, it wasn’t shocking to discover that when guides were alone they spent it fretting over sentinels. Jim rang the bell when he got to the door so that they wouldn’t feel crept up upon.

"Hi," Sandberg said, opening the door. "It was open."

"I’ll forget you said that, Junior," Jim said. "Let’s pretend you have some common sense and an impulse toward self-preservation. Everybody hungry?"

 

***

Sandberg had only been working with the PD for a few months, but it turned out he already had a number of funny cop stories. Most of them were also sentinel stories. Canadian guide licensing procedures (and the Canadian sentinel who managed for a couple of years with a wolf as his acting guide) were a source of appalled hilarity. So was the story of the guy Jim had pulled over for speeding last month, who, when he saw Blair’s badge that identified him as a guide, pissed himself and confessed to possession.

As Jack has promised, the food was very good. Sandberg and Sheppard ate quickly. With half his food still on his plate, though, Jack began to flag. His breathing was fast and shallow and he was holding himself very rigidly. Jim set aside the table with his own dinner on it and then retrieved Jack’s tray and placed it on the dresser. "What do you need?" he asked softly.

"I can’t put off using the facility any more. And then I need to lie down," he murmured.

"How do you want to do this?"

"I’m vain enough not to want John involved, and you’re stronger than Blair."

Jim straightened. "Clear out, kids," he said, cheerfully waving them away. They collected the detritus of dinner and were gone in half a minute. "You in any pain, here, Jack?"

"No, I’m okay."

"Will I hurt you if I just pick you up and carry you to the bath room?"

"It will be the most fun I’ve had all day."

It took longer than Jim would have guessed, but it was also less awkward. That was entirely Jack’s doing, of course. He handled his own weaknesses with the same grace he gave to everyone else’s. He gave simple instructions and didn’t seem to notice issues of intimacy or embarrassment, even while Jim was helping him change clothes.

"Set me on my stomach, but only set the alarm for an hour. I mean it, Jim. Don’t be ‘kind’ and let me sleep too long like this."

"No, I won’t," Jim whispered. It was too much work for Jack to breathe on his belly like this. Jim already didn’t like the way he sounded. "Are you all right?"

"I have to change positions. I’m spending too much time being still. The stitches...." The stitches limited his movement to practically nothing, risking bed sores or pneumonia. Almost as bad, the limited exercises he could do weren’t enough to protect his muscle mass. Beneath the serene, reasonable exterior, Jim could smell frustration and fear.

Jim removed Jack’s glasses and set them aside. "Just a few more days, and then you can start to work recovering. The stitches smell fine."

In the kitchen, Jim found Blair and the other guide feeding the puppy. "Everything all right?" Blair asked worriedly.

"Yeah, actually. He’s doing better even in just two days. But Marcia’s right not to leave him alone."

Sheppard folded his arms and studied the floor thoughtfully, "What’s with the dog?"

Blair shrugged. "Marcia said she thought Jack needed something... affectionate."

"Right. So she chickened out and bought a puppy." He began to pace. "She has to learn to relate to people. For herself even more than for him. And instead of taking a risk, she goes to a pet store."

"How is she going to live with that in the house?" Blair asked. "I mean, that’s a huge sacrifice for a sentinel."

"It’s not so bad," Jim said. "I mean, I could learn to live with that. I learned to live with algae shakes."

"Rodney has a cat," Sheppard said. "The litter box is on the balcony. There’s a little pet door in the window. Actually... the cat has been very useful. Marcia might get as much as Jack will out of-—what’s his name?"

Jim glanced at Sandberg. They both shook their heads. "No idea. ‘Hey, you?’"

They looked at the mud-colored puppy, which was now making a mess of his water.

"This could be a good thing, in the long run." He sighed. "I’ve got to go. Rodney’s been alone for more than two hours by now."

 

***

It had started to rain. Blair spared a thought to hope that Joel’s plans for the date didn’t include a walk on the wharf or something.

It turned out that Jim had never seen "Smilla’s Sense of Snow." Besides being the best sentinel movie ever made, it had some very nice discourse on identity construction, marginalization, and minority relations. And besides, the babe playing Smilla was really hot. Blair popped Jack’s copy in the VCR and settled with Jim on the couch. He wondered how Marcia was doing on her date.

About twenty minutes into the movie Jim frowned and glanced in the direction of the bedroom. Blair paused the movie, but he didn’t hear anything. "I’ll be back in a minute," Jim said, calmly. He was moving pretty quickly, though, and Blair wondered if he should be worried.

He still couldn’t hear anything. And Jim didn’t call for help. Blair sighed and flipped through the copy of American Anthropologist Jack had given him. Jim could handle it, whatever was wrong.

It was odd, though, thinking of Blair’s sentinel and Blair’s advisor. It wasn’t usual. Of course, it wasn’t usual for Blair to be as involved with his advisor’s life as he was. Or vice-versa. Until Jim had come to the anthro department at Rainier, Jack Kelso had just been the Graduate Director, one of a dozen professors Blair had had in class.

Jack was a better guide then Blair. He had a lot more experience. And Jim and Jack shared a lot of ugly covert operations background that Blair could only guess about. They had a lot in common.

Blair’s supervisor and Blair’s sentinel.

His thoughts shied away. Blair ruthlessly dragged them back. This ugly, unsettled feeling was jealousy. Completely inappropriate—-repulsive and potentially disastrous besides—-and senseless. When the hell had he developed this controlling, possessive streak? Not growing up with Naomi, that was for sure. It wasn’t like Blair had any kind of claim on either Jim or Jack. And Jack really needed as many as sentinels as possible watching out for him just now. And Jim—-it wasn’t like there was any question that Blair would be enough to solve all of Jim’s problems. And it wasn’t like Blair wasn’t constantly pushing Jim to make more friends and get closer to people.

And it wasn’t like Jack had an eye on snaking Blair’s sentinel. Jack had a sentinel of his own (and wasn’t she a handful?). Jack was mostly interested in working in research anyway. It wasn’t like he *could* work in the field with Jim, even if he’d wanted to.

Which he didn’t.

All of which was true and none of which made that anxious little ‘mine’ feeling go away. Crap. Where had Blair picked up this nasty impulse that wasn’t good for anyone? And what was he going to do about it? And—-hey!—-how come nobody had *warned* him about it? He’d been warned about federally trained sentinels and guides, and how they tended to be subject to weird controlling, co-dependant, and otherwise dysfunctional relationships. And he’d been warned that sometimes when one or the other of an established team started to date it brought up any lurking abandonment issues. But this situation had never come up.

On the other hand, how often would it happen? Most supervisors read a report every month and did a couple of site-evaluations and that was it. Inexperienced guides like Blair didn’t get assignments as difficult and delicate as Jim. And because of his research and expertise, Jack had more friends who were sentinels and guides than most people did, so he was more used to having a large pool of colleagues than most guides. No doubt, this situation was unusual.

Blair's reaction, though, was improper. And dangerous. Blair needed Jack’s help and so did Jim. And right now Jack needed them. This shameful anxiety-—that, what, they were going to abandon him?--was just unacceptable.

Unprofessional.

Immoral.

Wrong.

The pause timer expired and the movie started again. Blair hit stop and turned off the TV.

Jim came back and sat on the couch without a word.

"Is he okay?" Blair asked softly.

Jim nodded. "He can’t get scared in front of her," he whispered. "And he’s a lot less scared than I would be, in his place... but he’s having a hard time."

"Do we need to do something?"

"What? Oh. No. He’s sleeping. I think... He’s not in danger. He’s... he’ll be all right. It’s just—-you remember what Pierson said? About guides not being able to live normally because they’re being cheerful and gentle all the time. Blair? Are you--? I mean, how much are you not letting me see? Or letting yourself feel--?"

"Jim. I freak out regularly. And you usually know about it. And they teach us how to cope with... stuff. Stress and anxiety and, ah, being really *really* stupid. It’s part of the job. And I’m not even as good at it. So don’t worry."

Jim sighed and flopped backwards into the couch cushions. "This whole sentinel thing..." he said sourly.

"Not all of the problems come from that," Blair said.

"No, no, there are plenty of problems--" Jim’s head shot up. His eyes widened with horror and he slapped his hands over his ears.

"What? What’s wr--"

Jim clapped a hand over his mouth. "She’s home," he mouthed broadly. And then cringed. "Good night kiss."

Oh. TMI. Blair really wouldn’t want to hear Marcia and Joel ending their date, either. He hoped she wouldn’t screw things up too badly. She wasn’t a bad person. She deserved a nice date.

When she came through the door three minutes later, though, she was smiling. Maybe things hadn’t gone badly. He wasn’t going to ask Jim for details, though, no matter what. It was rude. Besides, there were things he really didn’t want to picture Joel doing. He had to work with the man.

"You weren’t out very late," Jim said, giving no indication that he’d heard her come home.

"His beeper went off. Apparently, there’s been a break in one of his cases." She shrugged. "How are things here? Did you trash the kitchen?"

 

 

Thursday

At ten o’clock a new folder landed on their desk. A series of home invasions in Elwood, a retirement community overlooking the sound, had gone from a robbery case to a homicide case with messy pair of double murders when a couple of residents woke up and caught the burglars in the act.

Since Robbery had had no luck so far and murder was now involved, the case was passed to Major Crime. The crime scene was a disaster. The elderly couple had put up a struggle, and even Blair could see that the intruders hadn’t come prepared to kill. They’d used a fireplace poker and a plaster bust of Mozart as murder weapons, which didn’t show a lot of advanced planning. They’d found the family jewels (hidden in the flour), but missed cash (locked in the desk), and dropped the coin collection, which meant a couple of thousands dollars in small, highly portable items were scattered under the couch, television, and china cabinet.

The living room, hall, and kitchen looked tossed, which they had been. The house also looked like the scene of a fight. Ditto. Outside there were footprints. And a cut in the eight foot fence surrounding the neighborhood. And motorcycle tracks in the dirt beyond the fence. It was a very complex, confusing crime scene. It took Jim three hours to locate and tag all the bits of evidence for Caroline’s people on their sweep.

On the way back to the SUV Jim’s hands began to shake. Blair sat him in the passenger’s side and dug out a baggie of granola from his backpack. "We missed lunch. Headache?"

"Not bad," Jim said. "That was...kind of intense."

"Hmmm. How long were we out there?" Blair asked neutrally.

"I dunno. Forty-five minutes?" He glanced at his watch. "It’s after one?"

"Huh," Blair said. Jim didn’t usually show this much extended focus. A three hour controlled zone was a nice bit of work. "Let’s go get some lunch."

The afternoon went just as well. They did surveillance work on a suspect of Joel’s. They came up with nothing, but not a useless nothing, since this probably wasn’t the guy they were looking for after all, and they could stop wasting time on a dead end.

It was after six when they got home. Blair was exhausted, much more tired than he had any right to be after a normal-length day of just watching Jim walk around in circles or sit still, listening. He slumped onto the couch and undid the tidy ponytail he kept for the PD. Today was Thursday, and they were scheduled for a weekend off. Although, really, you couldn’t count on that, not when spectacular and horrifying crimes didn’t take weekends off....

He could still see the blood on the floor of that tidy little bungalow. The nice old couple who had tried to fight back. Ew.

In the kitchen, Jim put water on for pasta and took two pints of frozen sauce out of the freezer. They were going to have to cook again soon. This weekend would be good, if they did have the time off.

One day until the weekend, but that was sketchy. Two days until Jack’s stitches came out. Seventy...three, two, one... seventy-one days until Lee Bracket’s next court date. Seven months until the probationary period was over and Blair was a guide working without a net—and wow, wasn’t he ambivalent about *that*?

"Five minutes, Chief," Jim called from the kitchen. "You want to set the table?"

Blair grunted agreeably and stood up. When he was half-way to the kitchen there was a knock at the door. "You expecting somebody?" Blair asked. Jim only gaped at the door in astonishment, which Blair took to mean, no. He reversed himself and went to open the door.

Stephen Ellison was standing on the other side. "Oh," Blair said, his mouth going dry. "Hi. Stephen, right?"

"Mr. Sandberg," Stephen said, smiling thinly.

"Stephen," Jim said, coming out of the kitchen, wiping his hands on a dish towel. "How nice of you to stop by. Do come in."

On the other side of the threshold, Stephen shifted and stammered. "No. No, that is, you’re about to sit down to eat. I don’t want to--"

"Nonsense. There’s plenty. Sandberg, get an extra plate." Jim smiled. It was a genuine enough smile, but it was cold and rather predatory. Confused and not a little worried, Blair got another plate. Jim came over and took his brother’s light rain coat and hung it up. "Why don’t you have a seat? Dinner is almost ready. We could open some wine? Or beer?"

While Blair got out the good parmesan cheese, Jim served his brother beer in a glass. Jim never bothered with a glass, not even for company. It was like he’d suddenly been possessed by Martha Stewart. Except, somehow, Jim’s genteel service seemed to have nothing to do with either hospitality or domestic vanity.

Blair couldn’t help but think off all the questions this was *not* the time to ask. Everything he’d wanted to know about Jim’s family and childhood. And where the heck Stephen had been all this time. What Rucker had said at Christmas...just wasn’t enough.

But now was not the time. Jim, serving up the sauce in one of the chunky pottery bowels, was asking casually, "So what are you doing these days, Bro?" Jim had the same look he had when he was asking suspects questions to which he already had the answers.

"Woodward and Goldman is refurbishing the race track. I’m the project manager on that. And, of course, we’re finishing up the Bear Island job. I’m splitting my time right now."

Jim nodded. "Enjoy your work?"

"I’d rather get back to marketing, actually. It was more creative work."

Jim nodded. "Cheese?"

Stephen was sitting very stiffly. "No. Thanks. I’m fine."

"I’ll take some," Blair said, regretting that he couldn’t think of anything to say that would have broken the tension. Jim passed him the cheese with out looking away from Stephen. Blair took some, reflecting on the irony that he wasn’t actually hungry at this point.

"Chloe is graduating kindergarden this spring, Jimmy. I’d like her to know you."

"How is she doing?" Jim asked thoughtfully.

"Very well," here Stephen smiled almost shyly. "She likes shapes. And animals. I think kindergartens are much more exciting than I remember... Ah. St. Anne’s is an excellent school."

"Have they tested them yet? It’s hard to be conclusive until about the third grade, but it’s better to get an early start. From what I’ve read, the Pendleton Evaluation is very effective for younger children."

Stephen looked startled and a little uncomfortable. "Tested. You mean, for... for heightened senses."

"I realize it’s a bit of an embarrassment, but pretending the problem doesn’t exist will only make it much worse in the long run."

Stephen stared at his plate for a long moment, then put down the fork he hadn’t used yet.

"Embarrassment. Being a sentinel. You know, Jimmy, I really don’t understand," he stopped, uncertain and unhappy. "I don’t understand. Of all the things you would be mad about... why are you acting like I’m ashamed of you? Like you’re some kind of dirty little family secret. I’ve spent my whole life trying to live up to you--" he shoved back the chair and stood up, fleeing to the windows.

Blair glanced at Jim, but he was unreadable. "Okay," Blair said softly, unsure if he should interfere, positive that things couldn’t get too much worse. "Anybody want to tell me what’s going on here?"

"We have issues." Jim took a bite of spaghetti, chewed, swallowed. His calm was deliberate and controlled, but didn’t quiet reach his eyes. "When we were growing up, Dad kept us in line by making us compete for things like affection and approval. It was a hell of a motivator."

Blair felt his stomach sink. "Oh," he said. It wasn’t really a surprise, not completely.

With his back still to them, Stephen said, "Whenever I screwed up-—and it seemed to be all the time—-Dad threw my perfect, brilliant older brother in my face. And I hated him for it."

Yes. Of course. It hadn’t just been Jim’s sentinel abilities his father had totally distorted. Emotional abuse... .

"Sometimes," Stephen said, "I used to wish he’d just disappear. Well. And then he did."

Jim’s hand began to shake. He nearly dropped his water glass as he put it down.

"Right," Blair said. "Okay. I think I’m going to go for a walk--"

"No," Jim said. "This is your home."

"Right. And if any of my relatives show up wanting to unpack twenty or thirty years of really nasty emotional baggage, I hope you’ll be kind enough to, oh, for example, call Marcia and see if she needs any shopping done. Or anything." Blair snagged his jacket and backpack. "I’ve got my cell phone." He ducked out the door and shut it behind him.

In the hall he paused to breathe. God, what a mess. He wasn’t sure he ought abandon Jim like this, but he wasn’t going let Jim use him as a shield to avoid confronting his brother. And he wasn’t going to be a pawn in some argument about sentinels.

Well.

He would clean up the mess later.

He got into the car and called Marcia. She didn’t need anything from the store. To fill the time, he drove to a pancake house and got out the journal Jack had lent him. Thinking regretfully about Jim’s homemade spaghetti sauce, he ordered a sandwich and decaf.

 

"Recent research which has linked sentinel health and professional performance to perceived emotional attachment of the guide has drawn attention to several very important and potentially hazardous problems, but the solutions proposed to correct ongoing failures in American guide technique will not resolve the most serious issues and, in addition, carry serious dangers of their own. It is not in question that how safe a sentinel perceives himself to be in the hands of his partner has a concrete effect on sensory acuity, physical health, emotional balance, and focus. And if a guide’s skills are mediocre, then a committed, emotionally involved guide is more likely to inspire confidence than an apathetic one. Rather than risk clouding a guide’s judgment with wild emotionalism, however, it would be wiser to address sentinel anxiety with guide competence. A sentinel doesn’t need a guide who is affectionate or sentimental. He needs a guide who is careful, knowledgeable, and observant."

Jack hadn’t given the article to Blair for content, specifically. It was the author he was interested in. The article itself was more an essay than a research report. Blair wouldn’t have taken it seriously at all if the man weren’t a sentinel himself, supervising four, and acting as a guide in an official capacity as well.

He cited some interesting research from India that suggested that anxiety played a role in disruption of sensory control and physiology. The Singh and Patel studies were longitudinal studies sponsored by a prominent university, so they might be worth something. On the other hand, there might be cultural differences in the manifestation of—-or measurement of-—anxiety that made their research inapplicable to American sentinel experience.

The article was better than the usual old school conservative-guide grumbling. Even though Blair’s concentration was shot (his thoughts kept straying to Jim and Stephen) it took only half an hour to finish it. Blair ordered more coffee, flipped through and read a report on Asmat friendship patterns and the construction of gender and object choice in south-central New Guinea. And then a study reporting new evidence that supported the hypothesis that Australopithecus was a scavenger.

After two hours, Blair’s anxiety and curiosity finally overrode his discretion. If they were still hashing things out, he didn’t want to interrupt, but if they had fought it was probably over...and Jim would need somebody there.

The lights were off when Blair opened the door. Jim was sitting on the couch, in the dark. That would have been more worrying if Jim weren’t able to see perfectly well. He probably didn’t even notice.

Blair hung up his jacket and came over to sit on the love seat. Not too close. Not saying anything. Telling himself, don’t push, don’t rush.

Jim said, "The newspaper coverage of Brackett. It was buried on page forty. But it gave a few details about, ah, about the negligence. Not a lot of details, but it mentioned that I’d been hospitalized several times with uncontrolled zones and systemic reactions." Jim paused, a heavy, thoughtful silence. "You remember that reporter who kept pestering you in November? She wrote a general piece, outlining some of the medical conditions that kill sentinels."

"Oh. And Stephen read that."

"He came by because he wanted to apologize to me for... some things. He wanted to make things right. Before I died. Again."

"Oh," Blair said, deeply appalled. "Um. You’re not dying."

"I explained that. I told him you’d taken care of that."

Blair nodded, wishing he could see Jim’s expression. "Did you forgive him?"

Jim sighed. "How could I forgive him? We were just kids. I—-and he didn’t....I mean, how can you be angry at the shit kids do? Neither of us understood what was really going on then."

"Oh." So were things all right, or not? Blair wondered.

"Sandberg, can you administer a Pendleton?"

"Yeah. Rainier has a contract with the public schools in the Martindale district. The graduate students do most of the work. But Jim, at five you can get a ‘positive,’ but you can’t get a reliable ‘negative.’ At five, sensory control is as patchy as motor control, and they’re barely living in the same mental universe as everyone else most of the time. They can’t always understand what you’re asking of them and even when they do, half the time they’re playing a different game of their own. It’s not like giving a development test."

"I’m not demanding a miracle," Jim said.

They sat in silence for a few minutes more, then Blair got up and went into the kitchen, turning on one of the shaded lights as he passed. Then dinner remains had been cleared away. The dishes had been washed and were drying in the rack. All the spaghetti had ended up in the garbage. Of course. "You hungry?" Blair called.

"No, thanks."

Of course. Blair poured a glass of milk, cut an apple, and spread peanut butter on the slices. Jim drank the milk without complaint and ate three pieces of the apple. It would have to do.

"How was Jack?" Jim asked finally.

"Fine. They didn’t need anything."

"Oh. Good. Look, it’s a little early, but I think I’ll turn in."

"Shower first," Blair reminded.

 

Friday

Friday was all surveillance. Jim used to do this a lot when he was working with Lee. In one of those quirks of law, you needed a warrant for a wire tap or a search, but you didn’t need a warrant to have a stake-out on a public street. Even when the sentinel was much more effective than ‘equivalent’ technology. These days, the clever and/or paranoid criminals kept a white noise generator around, and that was legal. People still had a right to privacy, after all. If they closed their blinds and didn’t carry on somewhere that could be heard by an unaided human in a public place.

All day, Sandberg was within arm’s reach and watching him. Partly, of course, this was because they spent most of the day parked in an ancient unmarked Chevy. In a bad part of town. In the rain. Mostly, though, Sandberg really *was* very alert and attentive. And maybe recent reminders of Lee were coloring Jim’s perception, but Blair wasn’t only unusually present. He also seemed unusually kind.

He’d brought coffee. And snacks. Every forty-five minutes or so, he handed Jim something to eat: buttermilk donuts (yes, really, from Sandberg!), pretzels, cheese sandwiches, peanuts, an apparently endless supply of small, black, organic plums.

Jim wasn’t hungry, but the thought of food didn’t actually make him feel ill, so what Blair put in his hand, he ate.

It wasn’t just the food. As Jim sat nearly motionless, tracking Skerrit by ear so he couldn’t sneak out the back, periodically Sandberg would crack or shut the window, changing the temperature slightly in the car and shifting Jim’s attention. On and off he held Jim’s hand. Not like date trying to send a positive signal. He took Jim’s hand palm up in both of his, hook his thumbs around Jim’s pinky and thumb, and gently opened the hand, spreading the center. Apparently he hadn’t taught Jim all his pressure point tricks—-not that Jim could have used this one on himself. It relaxed him, first his hand, then the rest of him, his muscles going slack and long. A couple of times, he rubbed Jim’s arm and whispered, "Deep breath. Come back for me, just for a minute. Again, Jim, nice and deep."

"I’m not zoned," Jim groused the second time Blair gently roused him with demands to breathe and make eye contact. The clock said 2:30, but it felt like he’d been sitting in that car with the rain tinkling on the roof listening to Skerrit watch television since the dawn of time.

Sandberg frowned interestedly. "No, it doesn’t look much like a zone. But you’re in some kind of altered state. Your heart rate has been hovering in the low forties and you’ve only been breathing about six times a minute."

Jim did the math. A breath every ten seconds hardly seemed possible. "Is that a problem?"

"It doesn’t seem to be. Does anything hurt? Are you having trouble concentrating?"

"No."

"What’s Skerrit doing now?"

"Pissing," Jim answered. It was the most interesting thing he’d done in an hour. The target had been alone all day. The only phone call had been a telemarketer. It might take days before the man contacted his partner, and if it continued like this, Jim would die of boredom.

"You hungry?"

"No," Jim said, wondering if this would stop his guide from feeding him.

"How about some coffee?"

At five-thirty, just as they were about to pack it in for the day and turn the watch over to another pair of detectives, Skerrit put on his shoes, picked up his keys, and dashed out the door through the rain to his battered truck. "Don’t get your hopes up," Jim said, starting the engine. "With our luck he is just going out for pizza." One of the bonuses of a sentinel doing the surveillance was that you didn’t have to park within a direct line of sight.

But, no, they got lucky. Skerrit met up with Bradford at a seedy pool hall downtown. They didn’t say anything specific enough to be incriminating, but when they went their separate ways at seven-thirty, each one had his own personal tail. Jim, happy to turn them over to the next shift, took Sandberg home.

 

Saturday

Blair woke up alone in the loft. It was ten thirty, long after they usually got up. When he found no sign of Jim downstairs, he crept up to the loft. If Jim were asleep, he would probably stay asleep through Blair's bed check. From the beginning, Jim had shown an amazing ability to sleep through Blair's movements around the loft.

Jim wasn't upstairs, either.

In the kitchen, he found the shopping list missing. Ah. The store then. Well. Blair couldn't remember the last time Jim had been out of his sight. Days at least. More than a week? Maybe it was good to give him a few minutes alone.

By the time Blair had taken a shower and fixed himself a bagel and tea, Jim was back with the groceries. It took them three trips to bring them all up. Jim had bought beef bones and chicken necks to make home-made broth, cans of crushed tomatoes and tomato paste to make sauce, a large pot roast, a frozen turkey breast. While they unpacked, Blair sipped at his cooling tea. The prospect of a long Saturday cooking was very appealing.

Jim laid out recipes in order of cooking time and oven temperature. Cooking with Jim was a model of efficiency.

The phone rang just as Jim was pre-heating the oven to bake the bones before boiling. Beef stock took twelve hours. "Hello?" Blair said.

"It's John Sheppard. I'm at Jack's. We have a little problem. Jack says Jim is trained as a field medic."

Before Blair could answer, Jim had snaked the receiver from his hand. "What's happened?" he asked. "No, that shouldn't be a problem.....Yes....Yes. We'll be right there." Jim hung and swept over to the oven to turn off the heat. "Get your coat, Chief."

"What happened?" Blair asked, opening the door.

"Marcia was trying to remove the stitches and freaked out with it half-way done."

"*Marcia* was trying to do it?" Blair asked, surprised.

"That part doesn't make much sense to me," Jim said. He shut the door and locked it in one smooth motion. "That's not usually 'do it yourself.'"

"Oh. It's a weekend," Blair said. "It's one of the things they teach us in school. If your regular doctor doesn't work weekends, try to avoid clinics and hospitals. The regular staff isn't on duty. There tends to be more mistakes. But it's been ten days and he wouldn't have wanted to wait, not if Marcia had enough training to manage it."

When they arrived McKay opened the door and waved them in. "Welcome to the madhouse. I’m sure you'll feel right at home."

Jim grunted (his polite grunt, not his contemptuous grunt) and charged past him through the entryway and into the hall. Isobel from the department was leaning against the closed door to Marcia's room speaking softly. John stood a little way away, his arms folded, staring at the floor. "She smelled a little blood," he said. "She got hysterical. Jack called us, but we can't calm her down. And I don't want to deal with doctors if we don't need to. As you can imagine, transportation is a big production right now. And we don't want to have to contain Marcia in a doctor's office."

Jim sighed at the closed door, then turned the other way and headed for Jack's room. The door was open. Jack was in bed, lying on his side, propped tightly in place with pillows. The bandage was off, and the healing wound revealed in two thin, red puckers. Without a word, Jim went to stand beside the bed, just behind Jack's shoulder. He leaned down and sniffed. "It's time," he decided, "These can come out. It looks like she got two already. You want me to do this?"

"Yes. Thank god. Jim, I appreciate--"

Jim silenced him with a hand on the shoulder. "It's a down payment, and you know it. Blair, come over here and hold the light."

"Are you having trouble seeing?" Blair asked, picking up the lamp from the bedside table and shifting the angle experimentally. It was more light than Jim normally needed.

"No, but I don't want to be fooled by uneven shadows." He looked over the first-aid kit someone--Marcia--had laid out on a TV table and tugged a pair of rubber gloves out of the box.

Marcia came in with John holding on to her shoulders from behind. "Jim won't hurt him," John whispered. "You need to let him do this."

Jim tore open an alcohol swab and gently dabbed at the healing skin. Blair swallowed hard. His own extensive first aid training covered sentinel illnesses and reactions, not wounds and injuries.

John had an arm around Marcia's waist. He was expertly handling a sentinel who wasn't his own. Blair spared a thought to be impressed. "Actually," John said to her, "this is how we got to be friends with Jack. I had appendicitis. No symptoms, but I woke up at five in the morning to find Rodney pacing the bedroom franticly and calling an ambulance. I felt kind of crummy, but no big deal.... He wouldn't take no for an answer. All the way to this hospital he berated the paramedics. And in the emergency room, he jumped all over every doctor and nurse who tried to touch me. He was a complete basket case. We'd only been living in Cascade for about a year then, and with all the traveling we do, we didn't know many people. But we'd been interview subjects for Jack, and he was a competent guide. He came down to the hospital and practically sat on Rodney in the waiting room until I was out of surgery."

"Left with the light," Jim muttered. Blair glanced down and watched as Jim snared a tiny, blue knot with the medical tweezers and then snipped a stitch with the bent scissors in his other hand.

In John's arms, Marcia shivered. John continued, "Rodney's instincts were right. I went bad unbelievably fast. The appendix burst on the way to surgery. Your instincts are right, too. Jack isn't quite safe right now. You aren't upset over nothing. But if you let your feelings of fear keep him from getting help....You have to keep you head. Panic is not helping either of you."

Blair was watching Marcia. He saw her eyes go wide and her jaw go rigid. She turned in John's arms and began to weep. What the hell?

Beside Blair, Jim set down the instruments and firmly pulled Blair out of the way.

"What's wrong?" Blair asked. No one answered him.

On the bed, Jack began to cough very quietly. Almost at once, he gagged and choked, unable to clear his lungs. "Relax, relax," Jim whispered. "It's all right." He shoved the pillows away and lifted Jack onto his stomach. It didn’t seem to help. The spasms that shook Jack were weak and almost completely silent. Jim slid an arm under Jack again and shifted his weight slightly. Jack coughed a little harder.

"Sandberg, give me some tissues," Jim said.

Blair pulled a wad of tissues from the box on the bedside table and held them out. Jim braced himself with one knee on the bed, rocked Jack back against him, and snatched the tissues in order to catch the tiny amount of thick mucus Jack managed to spit out.

Marcia was sobbing. She had sunk to the floor and was being held firmly between Isobel and John. She didn't fight them.

"Don't rush it," Jim was whispering. "Just relax. You're all right."

Jack didn't sound all right. He was coughing, but feebly, his abdominal muscles too weak to brace against. Jim shifted Jack's weight forward again. Jack choked, heaving silently for several long seconds before bringing up more mucus. He gasped and panted, exhausted, and slumped in Jim's grasp.

Jim tipped his head to the side, listening. "We're good here. Just relax. Sandberg, I need those pillows. Hurry, this is a really bad position for him. Let's get this finished." Despite his hurry, Jim's hands were gentle and confident as he positioned his patient and changed his gloves. "Light, Blair. Move it to the left. Just relax, Jack. We're almost done. Just three more. I'll be quick." Somehow, Blair had not expected Jim to be so calm and fearless in the face of mess and pain. In the field he was hard and uncompromising and dangerous. Focusing on his work, he gave no sign of this....competent gentleness. Careful and certain, he snipped the sutures and tugged them free.

Before cleaning the scar again, he lifted Jack onto his back and sat him up. "It looks good. There's no tearing. Just rest for a moment here." Jim shoved a couple of pillows behind him, securing Jack in a position that made it easier to breathe.

"I've been waiting days," Jack whispered, turning his head so Jim could reach his neck with the alcohol swab. "I have a whole list of things I was going to do as soon as they were out." He closed his eyes and dropped his head back against the pillow.

"Soon," Jim whispered. "No rush. Just breathe." He pressed the heel of his hand against Jack's forehead for a moment, then turned away to clean up the instruments and bits of spent suture.

Blair set down the lamp. His hands were shaking a little.

John coaxed Marcia up off the floor and brought her to the bed. She crept on and curled herself into a little ball pressed against Jack's hip. Without a word, Blair and the others left them alone. In silent accord they trooped into the kitchen.

Rodney was assembling lasagna, carefully unfolding wide noodles and laying them in perfectly straight lines in a nest of sauce. "Nicely done," he said to Jim. "And better you than me."

Jim turned his head toward McKay slowly. Before he could say something rude--and Jim had the baleful look that often preceded something rude--Blair said, "I didn't know you cooked."

"Yes. Well. Marcia doesn't. You should see the soup they've been living on. One hundred percent nutritionally complete and completely inedible. Rather like cat food, except I wouldn't have fed her soup to my cat." He began to ladle sauce over his neat noodles. The puppy, waiting hopefully between Rodney's feet, was chewing on his shoelaces. "You can't have it either," he added  
"Well," Isobel said. Whenever Blair had seen her at the department, she been well-dressed and poised: cheerful and pleasant, but tidy. Now she looked like a truck had run over her. She was wearing old sweats, no make-up, and her hair was coming down. "What do we do next?"

John pulled out a chair and sat down at the table. "The question is, can we leave them alone?"

Rodney, abandoning his lasagna to go check some vegetables he had roasting in the oven, said sourly, "Only if we don't actually care if they are both alive on Monday or not."

"Is it that bad?" Blair asked.

"Marcia is exhausted and sick," John said. "Emotionally, she doesn’t know how to handle Jack. She's been faking it so far, but....Even if her own physical state weren't an issue, she couldn't cope with what she's feeling now." He looked from Rodney to Jim. "It may be moot anyway. As much as we all hate idea, it may be time to put Jack back in the hospital. How bad off is he?"

"It's not pneumonia," Rodney said softly. "He smells like stress and exhaustion, but he doesn't smell like germs."

Jim's eyes were half-closed. "He needs to sleep for a couple of hours. And then he needs to move around. And drink a lot of water."

"Oh, speaking of!" Rodney went to a little teapot on the counter, peeked under the lid, and poured a cup of something so pungent that it made Blair's nose wrinkly half-way across the room. Rodney handed the cup to Isobel. "They're still awake. Make sure he finishes this. Now, while it's hot," he said briskly. He gave Isobel a stern look until she obeyed. "We can stay until after the doctor's appointment on Monday afternoon."

"We have to be in Florida by Monday afternoon," John said.

"We'll be there by Tuesday morning. Their stupid bridge isn't going anywhere. When you change the tickets, don't forget to change the rental car." He turned to Jim. "Isobel is great, but she's not a sentinel."

"We'll take care of it," Jim said. Blair nodded, although the decision had apparently been made completely without his input. None of the guides had been consulted at all. Blair wondered what that indicated, if it indeed indicated anything.

They left not long after that. As they went down the walk, Jim caught Blair around the waist and pulled him in for a hug. A little surprised, Blair asked, "Are you all right?"

"How are we supposed to cope, Chief? How are we *supposed* to handle...." Jim sighed. "I remember when it was you, dosed on the golden on that damn pizza, and I...."

"You understand why Marcia lost it today."

Jim nodded. "I'm surprised she held it together for so long. Jack is what keeps her world safe and reasonable. They're very close. If she lost him--"

Blair stopped and turned toward Jim. It was midday and sunny, but cool. "Jim, if something happened to me, you would be all right."

Jim stepped back, turned to flee.

Blair caught his arm. "You would miss me," he whispered. "You would miss me. But everything I have ever given you, *everything*, you would still have. And you would be all right."

Jim ground his teeth. "If you say so," he growled.

"Aw. Jim. You have to be able to think about this. I don't want you...I don't want you hurting. If I were to get into serious trouble, I'd want that really competent, calm guy I saw today. You were amazing, by the way. Jim...." But he didn't know what to say.

"Guides don't have the option of flipping out," Jim said.

"No," Blair agreed. "We have to be...present."

"Can you teach me? Because I--don’t want to fall apart and endanger you."

"Sure," Blair said, having no idea how he'd keep this promise. How did Blair cope when Jim was sick or spiking? When Jim was in real trouble? Hell, sometimes Blair wasn't nearly as calm and reasonable as he ought to be. "We'll figure it out."

Jim turned toward the car. "There's no way we are going to get the broth done today. Should we freeze the beef bones?"

"We could boil them overnight. Twelve hours is twelve hours."

"We could give up and eat pizza next week," Jim teased.

"Or not. It won't kill me to spend the night dreaming about soup. Or you either."

But they didn't get any cooking done when they got home. Simon was waiting outside the door.

"You have a key," Jim said.

"And you have a cell phone," Simon said sharply. "which you are supposed to keep with you. Anyway. We've got a problem."

"What happened?" Blair asked.

"Brackett's escaped," Simon said.

Blair felt his breath leave him all at once. Escaped. Lee Brackett, not in custody, but out there somewhere. "What the fuck--" he gasped.

Jim, expressionless and swift, unlocked the door and ducked into the loft for his phone and gun.

"How did this happen, Simon? How did we lose him?" It was all Blair could do not to yell.

"I don’t have all the details yet. He was being moved. I don’t know why or to where. We found the vehicle two hours ago. The driver was dead. Rafe’s got the case. When he couldn’t reach you, he called me. Sandberg--"

"Damn it, Simon--"

"Chill, Chief," Jim said, shutting the door and locking it again. "We’re on the clock here. Keep it professional. Who was transporting him, Simon? The Sheriff’s Department? I want to see the van."

"Jim, I’m not sure you should work this case."

"I can handle it."

"It might be better for the case if you didn’t."

"Simon, he’s a fugitive. He’s facing trial. We’re not building a case, nobody can claim I’m doing anything improper. Now, where’s the van?"

***

The crime scene was hours old. Police and medics had trooped all over everything. Scent would have been pretty much a wash even if the van hadn’t been left in a filthy; stinky alley. Jim gave up on smell and concentrated on sight, looking for any stray objects or fluids that might carry even a little clue.

For two hours he paced the vehicle, the alley, the street nearby. He focused close and he focused far. He tried to relax and take in the big picture, hoping that the scattered facts of the image would come together and show him what had happened here. He found nothing. No stray hairs. No bright, shiny buttons. No discarded gum or cigarettes. No tire tracks. No foot prints. Blair stayed beside him, patient and encouraging. Long before Jim was ready to give up, it began to rain, washing away any traces of evidence he might have missed. Not that he’d missed anything. The scene had been as clean and perfect as if a sentinel had tidied it up.

They met up with Simon and Rafe at the county jail. They had managed to learn more than you’d expect. Apparently hospitals weren’t the only public facility that was run by part-timers on the weekend. The order had appeared in the schedule: transport Brackett to Norwalk Psychiatric Hospital in Seattle for a five day evaluation. It was on the schedule, but there was no court order for it, not even a request from Brackett’s lawyer. There also wasn’t any obvious footprint showing when or how someone had slipped the transport order into the computer. Or even who the someone was. Serena from Carolyn’s department was working on jail’s IT records in an attempt to find out just what had happened.

The APB was already issued and Lee Brackett’s picture faxed to the airport. They had a black and white at the bus station. The media had been contacted, and the escape would be covered on the six o’clock news. But there were hundreds of roads leading out of town, not to mention the ferries and the thousands of private boats at anchor. In five hours, Brackett could be three hundred miles away or more.

There was no time for frustration, or to give in to the pointlessness of a trail so completely cold. Jim took Blair to the restaurants Lee had liked and the apartment he had rented. Maybe Jim was looking for traces by scent. In any case, he didn’t find any. They flashed the picture around, but nobody had seen him recently.

It was after dark before Jim ran out of non-ideas and headed back to the PD. "You need a car outside of Jack Kelso’s place," he told Rafe. "Just in case."

"In case of what?" Rafe asked, checking failed ideas off a list.

"Yeah," Blair said, "there are two sentinels there right now, and one of them is trained for espionage."

"Marcia isn’t thinking clearly and McKay thinks like an engineer. Brackett and I have history, and I’m an embarrassment to him, but what he feels for me is mainly contempt, not hatred or-or anger. It wasn’t me that brought him down, remember? It was Jack Kelso--who showed up just in time with a gun in order to stop Lee from killing me and establishing his credentials for his next career as a sentinel assassin."

Rafe winced. "Hell. Right." He picked up a phone. "How likely do you think he’ll try for revenge?"

"Not very. But if he does, I’m not at the top of the list."

The night sped on, tedious and pointless and *fast*. Brackett was gone and maybe getting further away every second. Jim refused to drive aimlessly around Cascade. That didn’t leave much to do, though. He waited, staring at the phone or pretending to check though Brackett’s file until almost midnight, when Simon ordered Sandberg to take him home.

The rain had stopped and the night was cold and foggy. Despite Sandberg’s shivering, Jim drove with the windows down. Maybe he would smell or hear...something. Anything. Some sign. What was the point of being a sentinel?

"You should shower," Blair said, as they took off their coats.

"Oh, yeah," Jim said sourly. "So I can sleep. That’ll fix me right up."

"Jim--"

"You hungry? How long ago was that pizza?"

"No," Blair muttered. "I’m not hungry."

Jim grunted and headed toward the stairs. "Set your alarm for early," he said.

Jim stripped and lay under the covers, breathing, resigned to a little rest before morning. Lee couldn’t hide forever, not with his picture everywhere. Where would he go?

Blair crept out of the bathroom and up the stairs to the loft. His hair was still wet. Jim could hear it dripping. His steps were slow and tentative; the careful tread of someone who couldn’t see in this light. Jim was hardly ever in a place so dark he couldn’t see where he was putting his feet.

Blair sat on the bed. "How are you doing?" he asked softly.

"I’m okay," Jim said.

"Uh, huh."

"No, really. I’m okay."

Blair laid a warm hand on his shoulder and squeezed lightly. "Brackett is out there somewhere."

"I know. He’s a fugitive. No different from any other."

"Jim, he tried to kill you!"

"Yeah, him and eight other guys in the last year. No, nine. And that’s only counting the Sunset Patriots who actually pointed guns at me. If I counted them all collectively...."

"Yeah, very funny."

Jim sighed and turned onto his side, curling around Blair’s captured hand. "What about you? Are you all right?"

"Of—of course. Why wouldn’t I be?"

"You trained for years to be a guide. You staked your whole life on it. And then when you got one—-your only chance-—he turns out to be, well, kind of broken. And now the man who did it is free."

"Oh." Blair pulled his hand away and folded his arms, his feet tucked up under him. "Oh. Right. Actually...I used to be really angry. At Him. What He did to you. But Jack was right. *He* doesn’t matter. All that really matters is you. That you be all right."

"You’re thinking like a guide," Jim said, turning that over in his mind. "And I’m really beginning...I get the whole guide thing. Hell, I’m beginning to get your point about friends. And family, even," Jim frowned, remembering the determined and committed little group in Jack’s kitchen. "I need you. And people we can trust. But you need to think like a cop, too. A criminal is out there. One of our cases." Jim could see him, uncertain and worried. "Sandberg, you’re my family. All by yourself, you make the case for why *having* a family is a good thing. But I need you to be my partner. I need you to think like a cop."

A sigh. A stirring. "Right. Okay. Keeping it professional." But he uncoiled and lay down on the bed, reaching out to pull the corner of the blanket over them both.

Jim didn’t expect to sleep, but the next thing he knew the phone was ringing and the bedside clock said 5:30 am.

***   
The phone rang only once, but it seemed supernaturally loud. A jolt of fear stabbed down Blair’s spine, and he lurched upward. Somehow, he tripped over Jim’s ankles and had to scramble to keep from falling off the bed.

Jim, his movements graceful and calm, sat up and answered the phone before the second ring. "Ellis—Where? I’ll be right there....You’re kidding me. How long ago? No, no. We’re coming in."

"What?" Blair asked.

Jim sighed and hung up the phone. "We almost had him. At the airport." Jim got out of bed and fetched some clean underwear from the drawer. "Pre-boarding a flight to France. We lost him."

"What happened?" Blair got shakily to his feet, scrubbing at his face with his hands. Really, there had not been enough sleep. It wasn’t even six yet.

"He stole a taxicab. It’s complicated, something about a large party of elderly tourists. Get dressed. Let’s go."

The mess at the airport had apparently been very funny, if you liked farce. Brackett had been in disguise, trying to travel as part of a tour group. One of the other members of the party had tripped and fallen into him. Brackett had fallen, too, snagged his fake beard in someone’s luggage, and spectacularly revealed himself as warranting a second look from everyone, including security and the check-in clerk: the airport staff wasn’t as perceptive as one might hope at five in the morning, but a counterfeit codger got their attention. The security guard identified Brackett from the APB.

Brackett, not being a particularly nice guy, grabbed the nearest senior citizen and used her as a human shield as he fled backwards out the door. Once on the sidewalk, though, the elderly woman began to beat her kidnapper in the head with her very heavy purse. Brackett had released her and pounced on the nearest cab driver, giving the man a concussion and taking off in his vehicle. It was all over in less than three minutes.

At the airport, three security guards and a manager watched in rapt concentration while Jim went through the suit case Brackett had abandoned. It contained exactly what you would expect from a single, elderly gentleman going on vacation to France. There wasn’t a scrap of evidence. "I’m not even sure Lee packed this. It hardly smells like him."

"What does it smell like," Blair asked dutifully.

"Laundry. This was all very recently washed. It’s all new, unused. A woman packed it, I think...she didn’t have much of a smell, though."

By about seven-thirty, it was clear that Jim wasn’t going to find anything he could use. Blair talked him into hitting an IHOP for breakfast before returning to the PD.

When they got back to the bull pen, Jim found a list of eleven names in his email. It was labeled ‘known associates’—-apparently of Lee Brackett. Blair spent the next hour trying to backtrack the email. No luck. He pulled out every trick he could think of, and then every trick Serena could think of. There was no trace.

Jim shrugged and said, "Dollars to donuts it was a friend of Jack. And it’s the only lead we have." He spent the morning trying to locate the people on the list. Four were out of the country. One was in a federal prison. One was in a hospital in Los Angeles. One was *probably* dead. Four were unaccounted for. Spending the morning fussing with credit card records and calling strangers on the phone (relatives and former employers of the ‘known associates’) was pleasantly tedious. It distracted Blair from endless questions of where Brackett was and what he was doing. Someone out there was probably helping Brackett. Almost definitely, if he’d made it this long....of course, with their luck, Brackett’s accomplice was probably the ‘dead’ one.

Meanwhile, they learned nothing from the debacle at the airport. The tickets had been purchased with cash two weeks before (which did imply enough organization and planning to make everyone nervous) by a young woman who had claimed it was a surprise birthday gift for her widowed father.

Wonderful. Just fantastic.

"Jim, I was thinking about lunch? Mave’s is open on Sunday. I could go get us some sandwiches. Something with whole wheat bread and vegetables?" Everyone in Major Crimes who had had the weekend off had come in to work the Brackett case. Even Joel had come in to donate time, and he was stationed in another department.

"Sure, fine," Jim said, not looking up from his computer. "Nothing with sprouts."

"You got it." Blair started to lean past him to snare his jacket off the hook behind the desk, and Jim’s hand snapped out and seized him.

"Who’s going with you?"

"Going with me?" Blair asked, surprised.

"You’re not going anywhere alone, Chief."

"But--" he considered the pros and cons of arguing this. It hardly seemed worth it. "Right. I’m not going anywhere alone."

Jim’s phone rang. He pounced on it hopefully. "Ellison. Who?...Yeah, thanks." He hung up, sighing.

"What’s wrong?"

"Stephen’s downstairs at the front desk. He’s asking to see me."

"Oh."

"I can’t—-I can’t talk to him right now. I—-what would I say?"

"Jim, he’s your brother."

"Look—-Just—-can you just tell him I’ll stop by his office in a few days."

Blair sighed.

Jim looked earnest and hopeful. "Cut me a break here, Chief, come on."

"All right. Fine." Grumbling to himself that he was in *big* trouble if his sentinel had already figured out how to manipulate him, Blair headed to the elevator.

Stephen was seated on one of the sleek benches in the main foyer. The room wasn’t particularly crowded, but it was clear that Stephen would have preferred to be *much* further away from the grubby, weeping woman on his left and the bearded biker with multiple tattoos seated on his right. As soon as he saw Blair he leaped to his feet.

"Is Jim okay?"

"Yeah, he’s fine," Blair led Stephen out of the public area and into the first floor conference room. "Jim’s in the middle of a meeting. His hands are completely full." The lie felt cheap and unkind.

"He doesn’t want to see me," Stephen guessed.

Blair sighed. Not only cheap and unkind, but also transparent. "Not today. We really are right in the middle.... Well, it’s been on the news, hasn’t it?"

"Is there anything I can do?"

Blair closed his eyes. "I really appreciate the offer. I think Jim would too, but this is...."

"A bad time. A bad time to turn up and offer help." He started to step back, paused, looked Blair up and down. "Are you a good guide?"

"I’m trying very hard to be," Blair whispered.

When he got back to Major Crimes, Jim and Rafe were in Simon’s office with the door shut. Joel was sitting at Brown’s desk holding the phone handset and staring at it sadly. "Something wrong?" Blair asked, perching on the edge of the desk.

"I was supposed to meet Marcia tonight. I was calling to cancel. You know, the case....She says now isn’t a good time, and she can’t see me again."

Blair blinked. "Oh."

Sighing, Joel put the phone down. "I thought things went pretty well. She seemed to have a good time. I really thought.... at least she was nice about it. I’ve never been dumped quite so nicely before." He smiled wanly, trying to joke. "Does it count as being dumped if you’ve only had the one actual date?"

Blair thought about privileged information and tried to gauge just how much he could say. "She really wasn’t giving you the brush-off," he said. "Things have been pretty hard lately. She’s had a bad year. And Jack’s injury--"

"He’s been out of the hospital for over a week now."

Blair thought about what he knew from his professional relationship with Jack and Jim and what his role was as their friend. Dr. Kelso hadn’t been serving as Blair’s academic advisor when he’d been shot. And Blair hadn’t been acting as Dr. Kelso’s field supervisee when they’d rushed over on a Saturday to help out when Marcia lost it. It was as much about friendship as about doing good work, and sometimes friends meddled. "Jack’s been having a hard time. The shooting....wasn’t that bad. But there have been some complications because of his disability. We’ve all been really worried."

Joel winced. "Thanks, Blair. But it still doesn’t wash. Marcia refusing to have any fun isn’t going to improve the situation."

"You like her," Blair said. "You like her a lot. But you’ve got to be really patient, here, Joel, if you want it to go anywhere."

Joel shrugged stiffly. "It’s not going anywhere, Blair. She doesn’t--"

"She’s a sentinel. And having a guide, it isn’t like having a friend." Blair thought of his meeting with Stephen downstairs. "Or even a brother. Having a guide is almost like having a parent, or a child. If the relationship works, it lasts for years. And it’s a very, very close relationship."

"Adrian and Sharona--"

"Don’t have a usual relationship. Most partners don’t need nearly as much, ah, space as they do." Blair sighed. "I dunno, Joel. Maybe I told you the wrong thing before. Maybe there’s nothing ‘normal’ about dating a sentinel. I’m not saying it wouldn’t be as *good* as being involved with someone else. But there will always be the senses. And the guide. And the vulnerabilities. And with Marcia, a really *complicated* professional history."

Joel looked down at the desk, thinking.

"If you really like her...give it a month or two and try again. Let her get her feet under her again. In the mean time, I apparently need a body guard to go with me if I want to go out and grab some lunch. Hungry?"

He watches as Joel dragged himself back to the present moment. "Pick up some pizza?" he suggested.

"Sandwiches. We could get a variety platter at ‘Mave’s.’"

 

Blair spent most of the afternoon (while he wasn't running fruitless background checks and credit card searches) wishing he could talk to Jack Kelso. It was impossible, of course. Jack couldn't spare either the energy or the attention for this right now.

That didn't stop Blair from wishing.

He didn't know exactly when he'd developed this uncertain and dependant streak. During the academic part of his training, he'd never needed a lot of help. Apparently there was a reason the first year in the field was supervised, though, and Blair had had a touchier first assignment than most.

Right now he couldn't tell how well Jim was handling things. Or pretending to handle things. After all he had gone through surviving Bracket's negligence and attempts at revenge murder, after finally bringing Brackett in...having the county jail lose him.

Meanwhile, Jim and Joel and Rafe and Simon grasped at straws, pretending that they were following leads, each idea running into a dead end, a brick wall, or a fizzle.

At 8:30 Jim put his head in his hands and sighed. Blair could see Simon pacing in his office. In a moment he would come out and send them home. Blair wondered how safe it was to take Jim home, and whether it was even worth it trying to get him to spend the night in a motel.

When Rafe's phone rang, everyone glanced up hopefully, then looked away in resignation. No one wanted to admit to hope: this wouldn't be a break either. A few seconds after Rafe picked up, though, Jim jumped to his feet. Blair barely had time to grab their jackets as Jim paused to eavesdrop on enough of the conversation to find out where they were going.

By the time they reached the SUV, Jim’s police radio was spitting out the details of a full fledged police chase. Blair clung to the dash and tried to picture the geography of Cascade in his head while Jim drove like a madman toward the other side of town. "Do we have any idea what happened?" Blair asked.

Jim shrugged, took a turn on two wheels. "Somebody spotted him in a convenience off Southerland."

The world streaked by outside the windows. With the police light flashing on the dash, Blair didn’t know how Jim was seeing.

Brackett was heading north on the bypass. Two uniforms and a detective team from homicide had been dispatched to cut them off and they were almost in position. It might be over before they got there. Blair hoped so—

"*Repeat, suspect has exited onto Kensington road.*"

There was another scramble over the radio. Blair counted at least eight cruisers participating in the chase and five more on the way. This would definitely make tomorrow’s news.

"*This is T-niner. We have the suspect in sight headed south on Blakely. Repeat--*" The radio sputtered and blanked for a moment. "*Damn. Oh, fuck. We need EMS at...the intersection of Blakely and Maxwell.*"

 

Jim didn’t break as he took the next turn. Barely breathing, Blair listened as the officer on the scene reported that the suspect that driven at a pretty good speed into the piling of an overpass. There was fire and a small explosion. The officer couldn’t get close enough to tell if the suspect was still alive or not.

***

There were half a dozen black and whites clogging the street when Jim pulled into the parking lot of a back-end computer repair shop and shut the motor off. "Stay with me," he snapped at Sandburg. The fire department hadn’t arrived yet, but Jim could hear the sirens coming down Portland Ave, and an ambulance was just pulling into the opening beside the rearmost police car.

The fire was piercingly bright and cast impossible shadows everywhere. Through the flames Jim could barely make out the shape of a sedan. Whatever color it had been was melted now. Jim stalked through the obstacle course of police cars and milling bodies. He couldn’t see into the inferno. Was anyone alive in there? He couldn’t hear. There couldn’t--there couldn’t be screaming. Not after all these seconds, these minutes. If Brackett was alive--

Jim shied away. If Brackett was alive, Jim didn’t want to watch his horrible death. It was something too intimate for someone so ugly. At the same time, though, Jim had to know if Lee Brackett was still alive. If there was any chance he could be brought out alive, still be in Jim’s life, still--

Jim shied back from the heat, stumbling back into the bumper of the nearest police car. He stared at the bright flames, trying to see through them, but they only whited out his vision. He could smell smoke and burnt hydrocarbons and charred flesh. Dizzy and blinded, his stomach heaved. Strong hands and Blair’s scent enveloped him. Blair turned him to the side, held him as he puked on the pavement. Blair was speaking, but Jim didn’t know what he said. The world was grey and spinning. He’d lost the senses completely, his own fault, not Blair’s, not even Lee’s this time. Wide open and focused completely on the fire. An idiot’s mistake.

He’d wanted Lee Brackett locked up, a prisoner, a convict. Out of sight and out of mind. Just another criminal Jim had caught and testified against and put away.

Long before Jim was ready to move, Blair was relentlessly tugging him to his feet and dragging him back. Jim didn’t understand until Blair shook him and shouted, "Fire-retardant foam, James. Big no-no, remember? Get. Back."

It hurt to look toward the fire, but Jim could smell the firefighters now, feel the vibration of the tanker truck’s pumps. Right. Move. He let himself be guided away.

Away from the fire, the night was cold. Jim sat hunched against the bumper of one of the black and whites while Blair waited, rigid and calm at his side. One hand was wrapped around Jim’s wrist, the only visible concession Blair made to his duty. Simon joined them not long after. "It’ll be a couple of hours before the car’s cooled down enough to get the body out. There’s no point in waiting around."

"I didn’t have any plans," Jim said, surprised how bland he sounded.

Simon sighed. "Jim, I would rather you not be here."

"I’m fine."

"Great. Get your ass home." He continued over Jim’s attempt at protest. "In case you haven’t noticed, Detective, this is a disaster. Our suspect is *dead*. A suspect who was wanted for his crimes against a cop. This does not look good. I’m just praying to god it doesn’t look even worse when we finish investigating it. And in the mean time, your involvement isn’t helping things. I want you far away from this. Bodily far away. Go home."

"I might be able to--"

"Monk is on his way in. I don’t need you. Go home."

Jim looked at the tangled, blackened metal. The protest died on his tongue. It was just habit keeping him here. There was nothing to see, nothing to do, no evidence to collect, no suspect to process.... Lee’s body was of no use to him. It was over. "Fine. We’re going home."

Blair drove. He put Jim in the passenger seat with the emergency blanket spread over him. The radio was set to an oldies station and turned up loudly enough that Jim couldn’t hear anything outside the car. On the way, Blair went through a drive-through--unusual enough by itself--and ordered Jim a root beer. "No caffeine, but lots of sugar. You don’t have to drink it all."

That was the only thing Blair said until he had Jim in the bathroom with the water running and a fresh towel folded up on the back of the toilet. Then, he said, "It’s okay, Jim, if you’re glad he’s dead. It’s okay."

There was no answer to that.

Sandburg was relaxed, almost cheerful, the next day. He was like an ant scurrying around the loft as he got ready for work. Eggs and bagels for both of them for breakfast. The garbage run down to the dumpster outside. A gym bag packed with toiletries and a change of clothes for both of them.

And all the time he was running around doing three or four things at once, Sandburg was smiling with relief. He smelled almost happy. Brackett was dead. Gone. Not their problem anymore.

Jim just wished he could forget.

When they stepped out of the elevator on the sixth floor, Sharona Fleming was waiting in the hallway. She smelled of fragrance-free shampoo and worry and the morgue. "Adrian found a problem," she said. "You need to come take a look."

They got back on the elevator and headed to the morgue.

Dan Wolfe was standing beside the door to the autopsy room. He was the picture of resigned patience, his arms folded, his eyes on the floor. "Don’t look at me," he said. "I’m waiting for the dental records to arrive."

Adrian was pacing a broad circle around the table. At the sight of the blackened remains, Blair stumbled and fell back. Jim glanced at him, but settled for tracking his guide with hearing and turned back to what was laid out on the table. It was mostly bone. Some of it was missing completely.

Not bothering with tact--and what possible use was tact in a moment like this, anyway?--Monk said, "I think this body was dead before the fire, but at this point that’s just a," he frowned distastefully, "feeling. The lab work isn’t back yet. Also, he’s the wrong build. I don’t think this is our suspect." Adrian looked a little wigged out. The idea of a guide turning out to be homicidal and kind of a sadist besides was really upsetting to a guy who’d been taught to trust guides since kindergarten.

"He’s the right height and age," Wolfe said from his post by the door. "I’m not taking any position until I’ve got something conclusive in my hand."

The hair was completely burned off and also the scalp. No help there. Nothing left for fingerprints, either. Jim stared at the body. Wondering. Who was this? Jim’s own personal nightmare? Or some innocent who’d been in the wrong car at the wrong time?

But no, Adrian had been right about that, at least. This man hadn’t been killed in the fire. Not all that long ago, Jim had been working a complicated arson case. He knew what a body looked like when it was killed by fire. What it smelled like.

The lips were gone. The teeth were wrong. Lee hadn’t had that tiny overlap in his two bottom font teeth. "Save yourself some time and start lining up missing persons," Jim said to Wolfe. "We’re through here, Chief."

Rafe interviewed the convenience store manager who had first called in the Brackett sighting the previous night. Jim stood in the corner of the interrogation room, listening to the man’s body, testing for truth. The kid was young and jumpy. And not very bright. Yes, he’d gotten a good look at the suspect. Yes, he’d seen the car the man got into. He was sure about the license plate. He hadn’t recognized Brackett’s picture from the news, though. He hadn’t even noticed the man until the other customer, a woman who’d come in to pay for her gas, had prodded him.

It was the truth, every word. Jim was certain. Ted or Blake or Ed or whatever was nervous and irritated by the long interview, but he didn’t smell like lies or guilt.

"Describe the woman," Rafe said.

"Hot. You know. Tall. And big...you know."

Rafe sighed. "Hair color."

"I dunno. Red? No, Blond. Maybe. I wasn’t looking at her *hair*."

"Did you get a name? Any chance she paid with a credit card?"

"Cash. She was really excited, you know? A real live escaped criminal and everything. Did I mention she was hot?"

Rafe glanced up at Jim. Jim shook his head. This had no where else to go. He stalked out into the hall to find Blair and Simon waiting for him. "Set up," he said shortly. "Apparently he had a plan B."

Simon grunted. "So the sighting, the chase, the accident--"

"All of it, staged," Jim said.

"I better reinstate that APB." Simon turned away and headed toward the elevator.

Jim watched him go. "It’s too late," he said. "He’s gone. We’ve lost him."

"We don’t know that," Blair said, trying to sound hopeful and supportive. "If he wanted to leave, he could have gone by car any time in the last couple of days. He’s still here. Probably up to something nasty. Which, all right, is *not* good news, but still--"

Jim nodded toward the end of the hall. The black jaguar was back. It looked pissed. Its ears were flat against its head and the look in its eyes was pure frustration. "I’m seeing animals again. The cat isn’t hunting. Brackett’s long gone."

Blair looked around. "Where?" he asked, even though he himself had only seen animals once.

Jim pointed. "There," he said. The jaguar was gone, though.

They spent the rest of the day going through the motions, pretending they had a hope in hell of apprehending their escapee. Lee Brackett hadn’t even lived in Cascade a year before he was arrested. There were no obscure old haunts or good friends to stake out. His picture was all over the news again, not that it would do any good. The same list of names that had given them nothing yesterday gave them nothing today. Simon and Rafe were edgy and pissed, feeling as though their prey was slipping from their grasp. For his part, Jim knew it was already too late.

At four o’clock, he tossed the towel in and gave up. Simon, who had been watching him all day, only sighed and reminded him to keep his cell on. Rafe, though, was surprised. "Jim, I’ve seen you chase down stupid, nothing leads for *weeks*." He protested.

Jim leaned in, lowering his voice. "Brian, it’s not your fault. I was there last night, too. He probably walked out right past both of us. All of us. It was dark." Not that should have mattered to a sentinel, but Jim had been stupid and emotional and useless. Lee would have to have been within range of Jim’s hearing, if he hadn’t been so intent on listening to the fire. "It happens. By now, he’s out of our jurisdiction. There’s nothing left to find."

They didn’t go home. It was their turn to babysit Jack and Marcia. Jim hadn’t forgotten. When they pulled up in front of Jack’s one-storey craftsman style house, Sheppard’s red maxima was still parked out front; they weren’t late.

"You okay?" Blair asked.

Jim opened his mouth to answer automatically and paused, wondering if he was going to have to lie. "I’m...okay." He reached into the back seat and snagged the bag Blair had packed that morning. He looked up and down the street. There was no one to be seen. Was this his usual caution? Or was he more...alert, now that he knew that Brackett was alive and free? Was he...afraid?

It didn’t matter. Brackett was far away. Somewhere Jim couldn’t reach him. He’d been trained to disappear. Probably nobody would be able to reach him.

He could hear McKay inside the house: "Did you remember everything? How many socks did you pack?"

A sigh that Jim could hear too clearly. He paused, trying to back his hearing off a bit. It didn’t work. "I had a list, Rodney. I’ve got everything."

"Cliff bars?"

"Yes."

"Airplane pillow?"

"Yes."

"What about the pharmacy? Oh god, did you remember to pick up a new emergency kit? This one expires tomorrow. I know we might have some leeway there, but I don’t want to risk--"

"No, Rodney, I didn’t remember the pharmacy. It’s not my job to look after you, and I don’t care if you live or die anyway, so I blew it off."

There was an edge to the words that made Jim hesitant to interrupt. He caught Blair’s hand has he reached for the doorbell. "Wait," he murmured, trying to shift his attention from the discussion inside to the squirrel in the tree behind them.

"I didn’t mean *that*. I’m not. I don’t. I know--"

"Yes, you do. You know you can trust me. But my job would be a hell of a lot easier if you remembered that more often." The sound of movement, a rustle of clothing.

"I’m sorry. You know I don’t—Look, the smell is just getting to me, all right? You have no idea. They’re both leaking all kinds of anxiety and misery. It’s making me crazy."

"Rodney. You can’t smell emotions."

"Don’t cloud the point."

"The *point* is, you need to calm down. I know it’s been stressful, being here with everybody having such a bad time. But you need to let that go. And try to remember that the reason your emergency kit is outdated is that you aren’t going through two or three of them a year anymore, hmmm?"

"Right. Right. Everything’s fine."

"Everything’s fine."

"Right.... Hmmm. We have company."

Wincing, hoping he hadn’t been caught eavesdropping, Jim pushed the doorbell. Marcia, hair lank and eyes distracted, opened the door. She didn’t bother to be rude, but stood back in to let them in and closed the door behind them. "We’ve heard the news," she said with slightly flattened sympathy. "I’m sorry."

Jim didn’t want to talk about it. "The case is still open," he said. "We’re still looking."

She shook her head once, sadly. She had spent years working with men like Brackett. She knew how slim the chances of catching him were now. He’d had days. He’d had help. He’d had about twelve hours of nobody looking for him.

"Jim, you have the fold-out couch in the den. Blair, the couch in the living room." She was polite, but she wouldn’t meet their eyes. Marcia didn’t really want them there. Big surprise.

Jack was in the living room saying his good-byes to Sheppard and McKay. Sheppard drew Marcia aside for a final word and McKay leaned down to hug Jack, who was in his wheelchair. Jim tensed, expecting Marcia to warn McKay away, but she scarcely seemed to notice that another sentinel was touching her guide.

"I left a pot roast in the crock pot," McKay said, squeezing Jack’s shoulder and stepping back. "You’ll want to put the potatoes in in about twenty minutes."

In just a few moments McKay and Sheppard, like a brisk, efficient whirlwind, were gone. The house seemed strangely silent.

"I’ll go wash potatoes," Marcia said, turning on her heel and heading for the kitchen.

"I’ll do that," Jim said, tossing the overnight bag on a chair and hurrying after her. He caught up with her in the kitchen. "Let me get that."

Lifting a cord sack of potatoes from the pantry, Marcia looked Jim up and down impatiently. "I can wash potatoes. You aren’t here because we’re completely incapacitated. You’re here because we’re crazy."

Jim took the potatoes from her and set them on the counter. He would rather not get involved with her purported ‘craziness’, but at this point there wasn’t much choice. He and Blair had volunteered to be there for their friends. As much as Jim didn’t want to have a heart to heart with Marcia, even doing that would barely cover a down payment on what he owed Jack. “You got overwhelmed. It’s no big deal.”

Briefly, her familiar arrogance and irritation flared in her eyes. “Gee, thanks. That’s so reassuring. Coming from all your experience.”

Jim sighed. “Okay, fine. I’ve got no training and no experience. I’m just the big, stupid cop. So cut me a break here. You’re the one with all the experience. You tell me what I’m doing here. Minus the bull shit about you being ‘crazy.’”

She sighed and looked away. Jim tried a discreet sniff, trying to judge her state of mind by scent. He wondered if he was being rude. Was it polite to smell a sentinel he wasn’t friendly with? She smelled a little like anger but mostly like exhaustion. She didn’t answer.

“Okay, tell me something else. Since I’m ignorant and all. Why do you give me dirty looks when I sit in the same room as Jack and you let McKay hug him?”

“McKay is harmless. And he grew up learning how to treat a guide. *You* are ignorant and dangerous.” Her eyes narrowed. “And ex-army.”

“So what does that mean? I’m some kind of psycho?”

“It takes one to know one,” she said sadly.

***

“Can I get you anything?” Blair asked as he returned from storing the overnight bag in the den.

“No, but you can take these away. I think I’m done for now.” Jack held out a legal pad and pen. “Thanks.”

“Do you want to go and lie down?” It felt like he was transgressing, asking too personal a question. But he’d come here to help, so presumably, he’d have to actually...help.

“No, I’m fine.”

“You look uncomfortable,” Blair pushed. The math Blair did in his head suggested that Jack was in his middle forties. The man sitting here seemed twenty years older. He was pale and drawn, and his movements were hesitant and stiff.

“I am uncomfortable in any position. And at least sitting up I can breathe properly.” Not giving Blair a chance to respond, Jack changed the subject. “What is the latest word on Brackett?”

“Not a trace. Jim thinks he’s already gone to ground in somewhere.”

Jack took his glasses off and rubbed his eyes. “Wonderful,” he muttered. “At least he’ll never practice as a guide again. We have that much....”

Blair shook his head. “He can fake an ID. Not everybody checks the credentials carefully. He might be able to land a job somewhere.”

“No, we’ll use the press on this. Lee Brackett will be infamous. He won’t get near a sentinel anywhere in the English-speaking world.”

“Oh,” Blair said, “Yeah?”

Jack nodded. “Yeah. For what it’s worth. How is Jim taking it?”

“He’s functioning. But he won’t talk about it. I didn’t want to force it while we were in the middle of the case, but Jim is sure Brackett has flown. It’s over. There is nothing we can do. And—and I don’t know, Jack. I just don’t know.”

“Can you get a few days off? Get him out of town for a while?”

Blair shook his head. “We just did that. And Jim with time on his hands isn’t usually a good thing. He tends to....”

“Brood?”

“Or something.”

Jack sighed. “Watch him. I wish I could give you better advice, but you’ll have to take your cues from him.”

The stew McKay had left for dinner was good, but Blair had no appetite. With Jack, Jim, and Marcia all putting their dinners away with grim determination, though, he felt shamed into cleaning his own plate.

After dinner, Blair did the dishes while Jim and Marcia helped Jack get ready for bed. Blair had some doubt about that plan. Despite any help they’d been so far, Marcia still kept her body between Jack and Jim as much as possible. Even leaving aside Marcia’s overprotective tendencies, she and Jim didn’t get along.

They didn’t have much choice, though. Although Jack was able to manage transfers himself, he still needed a spotter, and Marcia wasn’t really strong enough to take his weight if he fell. Putting Jim and Marcia in the same household for a couple of days wasn’t a perfect situation, but it was better than letting Marcia follow her guide into the hospital or leaving them to try to manage alone.

Blair was just putting the last cup in the dishwasher when the phone rang. “Blair Sandburg.”

“*Why isn’t your partner answering his phone?*” Simon growled without greeting.

“He’s busy right now. What’s up?”

There was a short, unhappy pause, and Blair felt his heart sink. “*Somebody just spotted Brackett in a bus station in Vancouver*.”

“Let me guess. He got away.”

“*Yeah. Looks like it. By the time the cops arrived, he’d given security the slip*.”

“Well, great. Canada.”

“*Canada, if he didn’t get out on one of the busses. Or make it on to a boat*. He hasn’t gone through their airport, we think. But that’s not worth much.”

“Right. Okay. I’ll tell Jim. Thanks, Simon.”

Blair waited until Jim came out to the living room before telling him. Jim nodded to show he’d heard and then went to find clean sheets for the fold-out bed in the den. It was about the response Blair had expected. Brackett’s clean escape wasn’t actually news, after all. Blair put on his jacket and found the puppy chewing on the leg of the kitchen table. With the ready excuse of taking it out for a potty break, he slipped out of the house. The puppy, shivering in the drizzle, did his business very quickly, but Blair waited down by the sidewalk until he was sure he wasn’t going to cry.

~END


End file.
